Enormous Gone Pie Peanut Butter Cups

Shockingly, I am the only chocolate & peanut butter fan on the esteemed tasting panel.  This is at once deplorable (who doesn't like chocolate and peanut butter?) and glorious (more chocolate and peanut butter for me!).  So imagine my excitement at the prospect of having a bounty of Gone Pie peanut butter cups all to myself.  Sure, I could share with friends...but I probably won't.  Could this be why I don't have many friends?  What's better, anyway: friends or peanut butter cups?  (hint: peanut butter and chocolate are friends with each other, and they can be your friend too!)

For starters, this is not your ordinary peanut butter cup.  As you can see, I have gone to great lengths in an effort to scientifically illustrate the sheer magnitude of a Gone Pie peanut butter cup; it is HUGE!  If a Gone Pie peanut butter cup were to come to blows with a mainstream peanut butter cup, the Gone Pie version would effortlessly annhilate the opposition: ethics intact.

The background:  I love peanut butter.  Do I love peanut butter more than chocolate?  That's a good question.  Yes.  But peanut butter and chocolate together are a combination in a different league. 

The tasting: Is it just me, or does everyone have their own way of eating things?  I mean, who didn't spend their childhood eating fudge stripe cookies off of their pinky in a rotating motion?  So, despite the imposing size of the jagunda cup I wasn't at all intimidated; this was familiar territory, simply on a larger scale.  I approached Gone Pie's vegan peanut butter cup exactly the same way as I did traditional peanut butter cups in my non-vegan days: nibbling all of the chocolate from around the perimeter and then savoring the peanut butter center with only the chocolate top and bottom remaining for accent. This was quite a feat, as the proportion of chocolate to peanut butter is quite high.

I'd like to say that it was a completely authentic experience and that I enjoyed it equally, but not so.  It would seem that, once again, Gone Pie's stellar ingredients have lent an incredible flavor punch to something I thought I already knew and loved, thusly improving upon it.  I checked the ingredients and, what do you know?  There I sat savoring this humongoid mound of deliciousness that can mainly be described as...peanut butter (!), thus begging the question: what kind of crap must have been in those mass-produced "PB" cups anyway?  Shudder.  As a bonus, my peanut butter seemed to be of the chunky variety...and me loves me some chunky bits of peanuts in my peanut butter! 

In order to assuage my guilt for hogging all of the PB cups, For research purposes I decided to do a taste test of the peanut butter cups at varying temperatures. 

• First, room temperature: solid PB cup eating situation.  Nom, nom, nom. 
• Second, refrigerated: my goodness! Who knew it could get even better?  I was able to break the chocolate perimeter off in a chunk, thereby saving the precious energy and calorie burning I would have wasted actually nibbling it off.  AND it afforded me the opportunity to eat mostly the peanut butter without all of the chocolate, which was of a lighter variety than I expected after the dark, richness of the cherry cups.
• And last, frozen: okay, I haven't tried the frozen version yet (what do you take me for, some kind of glutton?); but I have nothing but high expectations.  If Gone Pie can get me to enjoy a chocolate/fruit CANDY combination, I can't imagine that there's any way something as wondrous as a peanut butter cup could be negatively affected.

So, there you have it: 3 Gone Pie selections, 3 rave reviews.  I look forward to trying just about everything else in the Gone Pie arsenal and reporting back: 'tis my duty.

Oh, and what is better: friends or peanut butter cups?  Friends who bake peanut butter cups!