Review: 7Up Pound Cake
Mar 30th, 2011 by Jason
Guest reviewer Jason Steele returns with a review of a non-soda soda product.
Yes, you read that correctly, this is a review for 7Up Pound Cake. While technically not a beverage it is a rather odd brand extension for one of the Dr Pepper Snapple Groups famed drinks so BevReview asked me to give it a taste. Sodas in food form are not unheard of: Dr Pepper bubble gum, A&W Root Beer jelly beans, and even Diet Cherry Pepsi toaster strudels (I made that last one up.) Heck, there is even a recipe for Coca-Cola cake on the Coke website, so why not 7Up pound cake? I'll tell you why not…
Before we get to the taste let's go over the ingredients. I won't list them all but it does have actual sugar (no HFCS here!), flour, eggs, and butter. Of course it also has Propylene Glycol Mono & Diesters of Fatty Acids, Tetrasodium Pyrophosphate, and good old Guar Gum. Sadly, no essence of tree resin or even lemons or limes.
Fake-baked goodness!
The nutritional facts include a Serving Size of 1 slice. You'll also find 280 calories, 11 g of fat, 4 g saturated fat, and 0 g trans fat. So all-in-all you could do worse.
On to the taste! When I opened the package I was pleasantly greeted with an almost "fizzy" scent of lemon-lime. The smell really does have a faint "7Upiness" to it – albeit a chemically created one. Even sitting 2 feet away from it I still get wafts of it every so often and it reminds me of my childhood working at Camp Soda on the limon farm in Soda Springs, just outside of Zzyzx, California.
Maybe it needs a straw
When I sliced the cake in half I was hoping for some fizzy effervescence, alas there was none. Maybe they should partner with Pop Rocks to add some shazaam to it. You will see that is has a nice dark brown baked exterior (fake-baked?) that gives it the look of your grandmother's traditional 7-Up pound cake. (Fun Fact: 7Up was originally called "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda" when it was created in 1929. Surprisingly enough, that name did not catch on. Although I bet when grandma made this desert she did call it Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Pound Cake.)
The texture is spongy and exactly how you imagine the mouthfeel to be: just like all processed chemically mass-produced pre-packaged cake items that you find in convenience stores. The real surprise is the flavor. Not to be snarky but it tastes more like burnt Sierra Mist than 7Up. It definitely has a strong lemon-lime flavor but it's very fake tasting. My first few bites I thought "this is not bad." My third bite was "this is just okay, I should stop eating it." And by the end, as I finished the entire piece, I decided I didn't really care for it. It has an odd aftertaste of very fake citrus that lingers on the back of my tongue almost like if you chug a can of 7Up, only less hiccuping.
Do you really want to know what's inside?
I found this interesting product at my local Walgreens. It has also been spotted at 7-11 by a fellow BevReview.com reader who saw it alongside an Orange Crush Pound Cake… which if I can find it, I will review it.
So, overall it's not entirely unpleasant, but it is entirely unnecessary.
What beverage/food extensions would you like to see? Dr Pepper Twinkie? Cream Soda ice cream? Red Bull bacon? (Maybe not that last one.)
Kosker-for-Passover Coke unleavened bread
They also have Strawberry Crush pound cake-YUCK. I bought these for my little boy as a treat and they were definitely not that. My grandma used to make a cake out of a can of Sprite in a campfire. We put the ENTIRE CAN in the middle of the batter and opened it and by the time the cake was done the soda was evaporated into the batter and it did taste like Sprite. That cake was really good in my memory but with my adult palate I don't know how great it really was.
Kroger carried this in the Indpls area, as well as Orange Crush pound cake, and Cherry Dr. Pepper Pound cake.
They've had these for a while, my family used to get them every once and a while.