This is a dual review of the Reese's Peanut Butter Lover's Peanut Butter Cup, and Skittles Crazy Cores.  In both cases, the manufacturer got a wild hare to mix things up a little.  Take what you usually get, and skew it just a touch off center.  Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't.

In the case of the RPBLPBC (can't they find better names for these things?) it worked.  Like CRAZY.  I am a peanut butter lover, I'll just state that up front.  This Reese's variant has mostly peanut butter, with just the barest skim of chocolate on the bottom and sides.  About the same proportions as, say, the crust of a cheesecake.

I firmly believe that the regular peanut butter cup has the optimal proportion of chocolate to peanut butter.  But I will confess that on occasion, I have spooned extra peanut butter (from a jar of, you know, peanut butter) onto a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.  Don't judge me.

This variant cup is a great oddball version of the original.  Oh Reese's, how I love your peanut butter!

At first glance, I thought the Crazy Core Skittles were simply idiotic.  Why go to all that trouble to reproduce the experience of eating more than one Skittles flavor at a time?  In other words, the experience of eating Skittles?

Then I looked a little closer and realized that these are actually flavor combinations that are difficult, if not impossible to pair yourself.  For one thing, several of the flavors actually hail from the Sour Skittles line, albeit stripped of their sour coating to let the original flavor come through.  And when I tried them, I found that they were pretty darned tasty!  I'm sorry, Skittles; all is forgiven.

The five flavors are Cherry Lemonade, Strawberry Watermelon, Melon Berry, Mango Peach, and Blue Raspberry Lemon.  The provenance of each flavor is surprisingly complicated to track down.  I assumed it was just "mix one bag of flavor A and one bag of flavor B."

Cherry Lemonade: Cherry from Wild Berry, Lemon from Original.  Tart and sweet, but not much in the way of cherry flavor.

Strawberry Watermelon: Strawberry from Original, Watermelon from Sour Skittles (sans the sour powdery coating).  These were pleasantly flavored, although watermelon flavoring in general is a little too "bright" for me. A nice summery flavor, though.

Melon Berry: This one confused me.  I was going to say it's Melon Berry straight up from the Wild Berry flavor line.  Except that it's pink on the outside and green on the inside.  So you could say that the outside is Watermelon from Sour Skittles, but what does that make the inside, green flavor?  

My current leading theory is that this is Watermelon on the outside, and Melon Berry on the inside.  As strange and confusing as that sounds.  It just tastes sort of melon-y and fruit-y; no help there.

Mango Peach: Another complicated one.  This is Mango from the Mango Tangelo flavor of Tropical Skittles, and Peach from (I assume) the Peach Pear flavor of Smoothie Skittles.  I didn't care for Smoothie Skittles when I tried them ages ago, but I quite liked the Mango Peach Crazy Core Skittles.

Blue Raspberry Lemon:   Blue Raspberry from the Sour Skittles, and Lemon from Original.  This was my least favorite.  It was aggressively lemon-y, and I've never cared for Blue flavor.