The Bizarre 7UP Cream Cheese Cake Bites You Can Get At Costco

On Dec. 9, another 7UP cake cropped up on Costco's subreddit, specifically, 7UP cream cheese cake bites. This version of 7UP cream cheese cake bites, as Chew Boom reported in 2019, was produced by a collaboration between — surprise — 7UP and Café Valley: "Made with real 7UP flavor, the new soda cake bites feature a light and tangy crisp lemon-lime flavor in a moist cake form." They can be bought across the country for prices between $3.99 and at top end for $6.99, according to the Facebook page Costco Sisters.

Reviews for this specific product are not widespread. The Impulsive Buy's disappointment over the lack of a real 7UP flavor and proper strudel was caused by a previous version of the 7UP bites, so perhaps the newer version has improved. In April, Delish wrote about another 7UP cake made by Café Valley, a simply called 7UP Cake with "Moist & Delicious" beneath. It broadly endorsed the use of 7UP as an ingredient in cake, adding that it has its own cake recipe that requires it. The comments that related also leaned towards positive.

For those who have less issue with the soft drink's inclusion than the hit or miss quality of store bought baked goods, 7UP also boasts recipes for a 7UP No-Bake Cheesecake and a slightly boozy Pineapple 7UP Side-Down Cupcakes, for which you have to be 21 to even look at because the optional inclusion of rum is too scandalous. Or, follow these simple guidelines for matching cake mixes with different soda types, provided by HuffPost.

Soda cakes, however, are not some TikTok hack or weird food fad in the oft lamented Millennial campaign against taste. Rather it is an established, near traditional way of cooking cakes.

In a short piece for Southern Living, Toni Tipton-Martin, an award winning food journalist and author of The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, explains how baking cakes with bubbly soft drinks became "totems of Southern cooking." Before baking powder, leavening cakes was a specific art: "[requiring] knowledge, thoughtful measuring and combining, and astute observation skills—not to mention strong muscles." But soda's carbonation would give cakes that airy nature while also adding extra sweetness without all the labor involved with other methods. 

As The Chicago Tribune writer Philip Potempa nodded at the unveiling of the apparently more disappointing 7UP cake in 2018, these dishes were not novelties, but nostalgia trips to the '70s and beyond to at least 1953, when 7Up published its own recipe book. The rest of us are merely catching up with the long-standing trend.