What to buy - and what to avoid

Valentine's Day candy, ranked from best to worst

Reese's peanut butter cup hearts: A+
This is just one giant Reese's peanut butter cup, without that annoying fluted paper wrapping to get in your way. What's not to love?

Whitman's samplers: A+
These are hands down the best chocolate assortment you can buy. The chocolates are good, and there is always a road map inside that tells you which is which.

Dove foil-covered hearts: A-
These are probably the best chocolate you can get at the price, and they come in a miniature form so you can (tell yourself that you will) only eat one or two at a time.

Hershey's Pot 'O Gold assortment: B+
This particular assortment includes these little chocolate-covered toffee nuggets, and those things are amazing. The rest of the assortment is okay I guess. It's Hershey chocolate, but you get what you pay for.

Chocolate-covered cherries: C+
These are great as long as you can avoid thinking of the fluid which surrounds and cushions the cherry as "candy amniotic fluid." Which I cannot.

Cinnamon Imperial hearts: D+
These are pretty and they look nice in a dish or something, but they are terrible. This is truly a candy for masochists. They lack the subtlety and nuance of Red Hot Tamales, and combine it with a candy shell that is tacky in a way that makes you suspect they are totally stale. Which they are. Because no one ever buys them.

Conversation hearts: D-
I would have given these an F, but I have to admit that every year I buy a little box and eat it. So they can't be THAT bad, right? Conversation hearts are basically Valentine's Day's candy corn.

Chocolate assortments that don't have a map: F
How can they do this to us? Don't they know how much we hate the chocolates that we hate? Whether you dislike fruit crème filling, coconut, or peanut butter, you will be guaranteed to bite into one without a road map inside the box lid.

Image courtesy Flickr/clevercupcakes