Candy Review: Snickers Peanut Butter Squared

Stars: 3 out of 5

Pros: Peanuts, chocolate, caramel...

Cons: ...overwhelmed by peanut butter.  Not healthy

The Bottom Line:

Love peanut butter?

Then these bars are for you.  I'll

Stick with plain Snickers

If I Liked Peanut Butter More....

While I have enjoyed Snickers candy bars for years, I've never tried anything other than the original.  I decided to give their Snickers Peanut Butter Squared variety a try recently, and the results were about what I expected.

Instead of being a traditional rectangle candy bar, the Peanut Butter Squared are squares.  Shocking, right?  Two squares come in a package if you buy the candy bar size packaging at the check out counter.  I bought a bag of fun size bars, which have one per square.

If you are familiar with the traditional Snickers, you'd know to expect nougat, caramel, and peanuts wrapped up in a chocolate shell.  All those layers are here.  But they've added a layer of peanut butter to the mix.  In fact, it's a rather large layer of peanut butter.

And that's where my problem arises.  Don't get my wrong, I like peanut butter.  But I like it in small doses.  On a PB and J sandwich, I prefer a small layer of PB.  I find that Reese's peanut butter cups are the right mix of chocolate and peanut butter.  Here, I find the peanut taste is too strong.  After all, you've still got pieces of peanuts as well as the rather large layer of peanut butter.  It almost overwhelms the chocolate and definitely drowns out the caramel.

I realize that there are plenty of people out there who love peanut butter.  I bet they would love these candy bars.  For me, it's just too much peanut butter.  And it's not that I hate them.  I just think the original is better.

Being candy, these aren't good for you.  One of the fun size bars provides 130 calories, 60 of them from fat.  There are no vitamins or anything remotely healthy about them.  But what did you expect from a candy bar.

And the ingredients show why.  You've got milk chocolate, peanuts, peanut butter, sugar, oil, corn syrup, and more sugar.  Is it any surprise that the nutritional facts are so scary?

So that's why I will be avoiding the Snickers Peanut Butter Squared bars in the future.  If I want empty calories, I'll stick with the original, which I think tastes much better.