REVIEW: Reese’s Snack Cake

What are Reese’s Snack Cakes?

Each snack consists of a chocolate cake layer topped with Reese’s peanut butter creme and covered in milk chocolate.

How are they?

When I unwrapped my package of Reese’s Snack Cakes, I was expecting a take on a Hostess CupCake or Zinger: a supple, airy sponge slicked with icing. What I found looked more like a candy bar: two chocolate-coated rectangles nestled in a cardboard sleeve, compact and entirely coated with milk chocolate.

Intrigued by the snack’s appearance (and anything involving peanut butter), I felt this warranted deeper investigation. Because I’m weird, I like to analyze snacks layer by layer, pretending that I’m a junk food scientist studying a sugary ecosystem. Here are my findings:

The milk chocolate coating is smooth and creamy. It tastes like what you’d find in the candy aisle, but a little sturdier and less prone to melting.

Next, the peanut butter creme has the delicious flavor of Reese’s filling, but with textural differences that remind me of marzipan or even hard fudge. It is soft, but dense and malleable enough that the layer can retain its shape when separated from the cake.

Finally, the cake layer is difficult to classify. Its deep cocoa flavor pairs well with the other cake components, but its texture is unsuccessful. Dense, dry, and crumbly, it is barely a cake. It tastes like a cake deprived of moisture or air, with all of its crumbs squeezed together. It brings to mind protein-enhanced snack bars (think Protein One), and with six grams of protein, it could probably pass as one more easily than it could pass as a cake.

Overall, the peanut butter and chocolate outshine an unsuccessful cake, which should have been the star of this snack. A different product name would have helped to leverage expectations, but the result is not Reese’s strongest offering.

Anything else you need to know?

In press releases, Reese’s has billed its Snack Cakes as breakfast or mid-morning snacks. Given both the product’s candy bar sweetness and lack of resemblance to cake, I don’t understand the breakfast connection. Coffee cakes, muffins, and scones will not need to fight these snack cakes for space at the brunch table.

Conclusion:

Decidedly un-cakelike, Reese’s Snack Cakes deliver on the classic chocolate and peanut butter pair, but are worth less than the sum of their parts.

Purchased Price: $1.99
Size: 2.75 oz pack (2 cakes)
Purchased at: Sheetz
Rating: 5 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: 380 calories, 21 grams of fat, 11 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, less than 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 170 milligrams of sodium, 45 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of fiber, 33 grams of sugar, and 6 grams of protein.