Good mornin…er…afternoon, Junk Food Nation. Yeah so…I woke up nice and early this morning, began working on today’s post, then decided to crawl into bed for a quick moment…and four hours later, here I am.  Wow.  The power of sleep compels me.

Anyways, even though it’s March, I’d like to take this moment to discuss a little about Easter Candy.  Unlike my diatribe about Valentine’s Day candy, I actually LOVE Easter Candy.  I enjoy Starburst jelly beans and I love Easter baskets!  I’m not sure I could reasonably articulate why I think Easter Candy is any different than V Day candy. I mean, both have certain motifs related to it, neither has any real distinct flavors associated with the holiday, and companies try the same ploy: “We’ll just re-shape our candy into hearts/eggs!”

But the fact remains, I really enjoy Easter candy. I like seeing how many different ____-filled eggs companies can come up with. I think little kids nibbling on the ears of a chocolate bunny is as the way it should be.  And again, I love. Love. LOVE. Jellybeans.

To that end, I was walking through my local Walgreens, and they now have gigantic displays of Easter candy – and within those displays there’s one of about 20-25 different flavors of Russel Stover Chocolate Eggs!  They are filled with various creams, and when I saw this I started going nuts, pulling them off the wall into my basket – caramel, peanut butter, strawberry cream, chocolate cream.  Finally, after I had loaded about 9 into my basket, I had to stop and say “Dude…you’re a maniac.  These aren’t THAT exciting. They are Russell Stovers chocolates in the shape of an egg.  No matter how exciting the cream is, the format is pretty basic.”

And my inner brain was right. So, I chose the two more interesting flavors (to me) and that’s what I’m going to review today.  My two selections: Russell Stover Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter Egg & Maple Cream Egg!

Russell Stover Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter Egg & Maple Cream Egg were the only two flavors I really hadn’t seen before. On its website, Russell Stover has most of their flavorslisted for sale.

Russell Stover Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter Egg…how glorious.  I mean, Reeses makes a great peanut butter egg, but CRUNCHY peanut butter?  And not only crunchy, but EXTRA CRUNCHY? This I had to try.

This egg has milk chocolate, and is an easy way to down 17% of your daily fat in like two bites.  Woo!

Russell Stover Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter Egg looks standard – oval shape, lighter milk chocolate shell, and smelled like chocolate and peanut butter as soon as I opened the wrapper.

This is what the Russell Stover Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter Egg looked like opened up. Er…sure if doesn’t look like smooth peanut butter, but this is KINDA what a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup filling looks like.  Where’s the extra crunchy?

After chomping on this Russell Stover Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter Egg, here’s the fair assessment: it does TASTE delicious.  I mean, how could it not? It’s milk chocolate and peanut butter, and it’s really sweet.  Tasting very similar to Reese’s, the flavor combo in this egg is expected and delivers, bigtime. Very tasty. But the Extra Crunchy is a misnomer! Sure, there were a few peanut crunches in there – but EXTRA crunchy?  I half expected this to be like a chocolate covered peanut cluster.  Meh.

Russell Stover Maple Cream Egg caught me as well, because being from Upstate New York, I’m a sucker for anything maple.

Russell Stover Maple Cream Egg only has 110 calories, and only 5% of your daily fat! You could eat 3 of these and still not reach the fat content of one Extra Crunchy peanut butter egg.  Interesting.

Russell Stover Maple Cream Egg is covered in Dark Chocolate, and apparently the chocolatiers had fun with decorating the surface of this one.

Russell Stover Maple Cream Egg, opened up, for your viewing pleasure.  The inside cream was so soft, the outer shell cracked into several pieces as I was trying to bend it in half.  A light orange-beige color, the cream, tasted by itself, tasted SORT OF like maple sugar, but sweeter.  I got some decent maple flavor, but it was almost like maple sugar and brown sugar mixed together.  Very sweet.

The Russell Stover Maple Cream Egg, eaten as a whole, was interesting.  I must say, I’m not sure the flavors went together well.  The maple cream was very sweet, and the dark chocolate was of good quality and slightly bitter, so the duo was decadent in taste…but it ended up really just tasting like a VERY SWEET dark chocolate.  I enjoyed the flavor, sure, but it was more overwhelming than any sort of refined flavor.

In reviewing these two eggs, I think my inner brain was right in cajoling me to only do two, and not twelve.

Comments? Hit me in the comments below or hit me on Twitter @junkfoodguy or on my Facebook Page.

Sincerely, Junk Food Guy