Hershey’s Marshmallow Pumpkin is presumably meant to cash-in on Halloween, though the actual product looks nothing like a pumpkin (it’s more of a semi-round blob). It also doesn’t have any pumpkin flavour, though that much is clear just by looking at the wrapper.

I’m generally not a fan of chocolates with marshmallow in it; there are a few exceptions (such as the amazingly good but difficult to find Valomilk), but for the most part marshmallows in candy tend to have an unpleasantly chewy/spongy texture. That is certainly true here.

Hershey’s Marshmallow Pumpkin consists of a thick, chewy marshmallow coated with a generous topping of dark chocolate. The chocolate coating is fine, if a little sweet. It’s the marshmallow where this candy seriously falters. It has an unpleasantly rubbery, almost chewing gum-like texture. It also doesn’t really have the vanilla flavour that you’d expect; it’s pretty bland, with a subtler-than-average marshmallow taste that seems slightly off. Pretty much all the sweetness comes from the chocolate.

I’m not sure what it is about marshmallow that makes it so hard to pull off in candy form. I think that anyone who wants to make a marshmallow-based candy should be required to eat a few Valomilks (I’ll post a Valomilk review once I can get my hands on one – they’re pretty much impossible to find in Canada); it just gets everything right, as far as marshmallow goes. This, on the other hand, is the anti-Valomilk.

Manufactured by: Hershey
Calories (31 g pumpkin): 110