Reese's Whipps, The Diet Candy

As various fad diets sweep our nation, the candy manufacturers are ready to pounce, declaring their candy to be dietarily thrifty in some way.  One which recently caught my eye is the new Reese's Whipps bar.

Reese's Whipps (that's its name, even though I only ate one - the plurality of the name makes grammar a chore) is, let me just say this up front, ridiculously sweet.  Tooth-achingly sweet.  As sweet as a Cadbury Crème Egg, but not as gooey inside.  So sweet that it will make you desperately thirsty.

The Reese's Whipps is so sugary that it is faintly gritty with sugar.  As if they mixed in as much sugar as they could, before it reached the complete saturation point - and slightly beyond.  It's like eating a peanut butter flavored Peep, to continue our Easter theme.  Which is a pity, because the entire point of eating a Reese's product is their delicious hold on peanut butter.  

I thought (I don't know why) that it would be like an Uno bar.  The Uno bar, if you're not familiar with this delicious bit of confectionary, has a semi-solid foam nougat interior.  It breaks off when you bite into it, then dissolves into a chocolatey creamy deliciousness on the tongue.  In fact, I bought an Uno bar so that I could compare and contrast.

I needn't have bothered.  The inside of a Reese's Whipps is sticky and foamy, much like - again I circle back to the analogy - a Peep.  The texture has much more in common with marshmallow than it does with "nougat" in the sense I'm familiar with.

I was fascinated by the physics (and horrified by the taste) so I ended up playing with the insides for a bit.  If you push your fingertip into the center, it takes an imprint of your fingerprint.  It doesn't stretch like marshmallow.  But if you pinch off a bit, you can roll it into a ball which will bounce in a satisfying fashion.  Also it will leave little sticky circles on your desk, and you'll need to go find the Windex to clean it off.

To make up for its touted lack of fat, a Reese's Whipps contains a stunning 31 grams of sugar.  The worst part is that the supposed peanut butter taste is only a glancing flavor.  It tastes about as peanut buttery as a peanut butter taffy, that lone tan piece of saltwater taffy in the bottom of the bag.  Which is to say, not very.

The label proclaims it has "40% less fat than the leading chocolate candy."  Which raises the question, which chocolate candy would that be?  My Reese's Whipps had 9 grams of fat, for a 53 gram bar.  I did some research and found that a 57 gram Snickers bar has 11 grams of fat, and a 42 gram pair of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups has 13 grams of fat.  

So… okay, there is a slight fat savings to be had.  But seriously, this thing is so foamy and painfully sweet and bad in every way that I strongly recommend you just get a regular candy bar.  An Uno will set you back a whole 17 grams of fat, but it only has 20 grams of sugar.  And it is far tastier!

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user cacaobug