Hello Halloween Pumpkin Marshmallows - H-Mart
I'm a total Scrooge when it comes to Christmas and winter-holidays, so I won't be reviewing anything "winter-y" until December. (When I kind of have to.) For me, November isn't about pre-gaming for Christmas, it's more about celebrating post-Halloween and scooping up tons of clearance snacks and goodies.
These marshmallows were another item that were featured in my
H-Mart Halloween Haul video, and not only are these adorable little orange puffs shaped like 3-D pumpkins, but they're pumpkin flavored! Not pumpkin spiced, but actual pumpkin! I had to give them their own in-depth review!
I don't know much about this EIWA brand, but these marshmallows seem like a fairly generic seasonal product, and even though they're a novelty, the design is incredibly well done!
The large plastic bag has all these wonderful eye catching colors, a spooky haunted house, a pumpkin patch, bats, and patterns printed on the heat-sealed edges. It's a little on the busy-side of things, but I think it works really well for the holiday. Just looking at it makes me unreasonably happy. (Then again I'm still a goth-girl at heart and Halloween-anything is guaranteed to make it skip a beat.) If I had to pick just one thing about this packaging that was really done well, it'd be the colors. Everything is so bold and vibrant! This caught my eye right away due to the contrast of this purple-y blue backdrop and the bold yellow-orange text. If more companies broke out of the color box and did something like this...I'd be a very happy food photographer.
The attention to detail and designs are continued on the individual wrappers inside the bag as well.
Oh my god, look at these cute little faces printed on the wrappers! We've got spooky ones with jagged teeth, cuter ones with heart-shaped noses, and smiley ones with Disney-esque facial features. (Spooky version is easily my favorite.) Packaging and presentation is something that Asian candy companies do extremely well. It might not be as quick or cost effective as releasing a seasonal product with all of the same designs, but it makes such a difference. All of these faces add a lot more visual interest to the product when it's dumped into a candy bowl, and it adds a certain level of playfulness and whimsy.
I love everything about the packaging, but what I'm most excited for is how these marshmallows actually taste. In America most of our pumpkin seasonal sweets aren't pumpkin flavored at all, they're pumpkin spiced. (Which seems to be a purely American flavor that doesn't really exist in other countries.) In Asian sweets, when something is "pumpkin flavored" they really mean it! So these little puffs should taste like a real squash-y, but sweet, pumpkin. I was super excited about this, but....
The flavoring is really really mild. In my video I ate one of these along with all of my other Halloween goodies, and I couldn't taste anything pumpkin-y about it at all. I've since eaten a few on their own, after cleansing my palette, and you can taste a teeny tiny hint of squash-y pumpkin, but it's still barely there. If you eat very slowly and savor the marshmallow you can taste an almost apple-and-pumpkin-cider flavoring in the marshmallow, but it's as subtle as subtle can be. I'm a little disappointed that the flavoring isn't more intense, but the marshmallows are still really soft, sweet and enjoyable. For a seasonal product, I feel like this is pretty high quality, and I would definitely buy them again next year to hand out. (Since they're so cute and mildly flavored.) However, if you're looking for something that tastes intensely like pumpkin, these will be pretty disappointing.
On a Pumpkin Scale of 1-5 (5 being the most pumpkin-y) I’d give this puff a 5 for looks, and a 2 for flavor! These looks super adorable and pumpkin-y, but the flavoring is so incredibly mild that you might not even know they were flavored at all. If you want to get the most out of the flavoring, you should cleanse your palette and eat one of these slowly without drinking anything flavored. If you do that there's a subtle, but sweet, pumpkin cider flavoring that's really nice, but it's extremely weak. Still, they're a really nice quality and they have wonderfully fun packaging.
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