Saturday, April 26, 2014

Shoeido Banana Roll - H-Mart: Cherry Hill, NJ

Shoeido Banana Roll - H-Mart: Cherry Hill, NJ
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, banana roll! (I'm sorry.)

My boyfriend has been teasing me about being pregnant because of my weird food cravings. I don't know why, but for the last few months I just want wasabi flavored snacks and banana flavored sweets.
Before I get any further, I'm not pregnant. I just wanted that on record since I have family members who read this blog (or glance it over) and I don't want any panic texts coming my way.

Anyway, back to the food!

I plan on cooking something special later tonight, and it required some unique ingredients, so I stopped at H-mart on my way home the other day.

It's been a really long time since I've been to H-Mart. I only go there when I want to buy actual ingredients to cook with because their snack section is extremely small when Compared to The Asian Food Market (which has several aisles of sweets). Since snacks are typically what I review, it doesn't make sense to go to H-mart too often.

Well apparently, when I wasn't paying attention, H-mart got a TON of interesting goodies. I started my shopping trip with a hand basket...and quickly had to change to a cart. So look forward to seeing some H-mart items in the near future.

Sorry, I went off on a tangent. Let's get back to this banana cake roll!

Like I said earlier, I've been craving banana, and this little roll cake was sitting in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. As soon as I saw the yellow banana graphics, I snatched it up right away.


The wrapping is very simple, but bold, and I absolutely love it. There are vectored bananas everywhere, which I love, and a very polite message. (Seen above.) Other than the yellow and green graphics, there isn't much to this design, so I am going to move on to it's smell and taste.
Once I peeled the wrapper open there was a subtle scent of banana pudding and vanilla. From what I understand, the roll cake is just a normal vanilla cake and all the banana flavoring is in the cream, so it makes sense that the aroma is pretty mild. After all the cream-to-cake ratio isn't 50:50. (More like 15:85.) 

It's a bit hard to tell, but there is a foil packet stuck to the bottom of the roll cake. It's one of those packets that is meant to ensure freshness, but it's basically filled with poison. I find these in a lot of the food items I buy at the Asian grocery (and some of the items from Wegman's), so I am used to finding and removing such things before eating, but you might want to remove the packet entirely before giving any cake to a child who might not know any better.

For a single serving item, I though this was a pretty hefty size. To be honest I don't buy snack cakes very often, so this might be on par with the current size of Tastykakes, but it seemed rather big to me. So instead of just eating the entire rolls cake in one sitting,  I sliced a bit of the cake off to get some nicer photos.

This was about 1/3rd of the cake, but my photography plates are appetizer sized.
Visually, the cake is really pretty, and it smells like banana pudding, so I'm really look forward to eating it.

I took a bite...


and the cake was soft and dense, but it was pretty drying. I needed to grab a glass of water to help wash the first bite it down, but the creme filling had some really nice banana flavoring. The filling is light and it seems to be shortening based, like a lot of snack cake fillings, but there is some really creamy banana flavoring in there. The taste reminds me of Jello-brand banana pudding, but the texturing is a bit waxy and very light, kind of like Cool Whip.

I ended up splitting this cake into two portions and eating it over the course of two days, and it was pretty enjoyable. The vanilla roll cake made my mouth a bit too dry for my liking, but when it was paired with a glass of water (or milk) it was just fine. I plan on buying more of these in the future and I would say they are definitely worth a try if you're a banana lover.
Do you guys want me to start including nutrition information in the future?
© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net
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