At the Point, a woman serves up a twist on a New York banana pudding she remembers fondly

It wasn’t that easy to find the first time, says Kylie McCardel, now a regular customer. “I was a little confused.”

A doorbell, somewhere behind the Insomnia at the corner of Mayor Street Upper and North Wall Avenue.

Once inside, the noise of busy afternoons fades into a striking silence of the building lobby.

McCardel takes the elevator, and a few doors down the hall, Shahzadi Raza and Ali Hasan Abbasi, her husband, are ready for a chat—and to hand over her order of banana pudding from Feed the Blob.

Memories of pudding

In September 2012, Raza was transiting through New York and meeting a friend to visit Times Square.

On their way back to the airport, they spotted a Magnolia Bakery, she says. “So we stopped there and he got the banana pudding and I got a red velvet cupcake.”

Her friend pointed out the mistake, she says. With something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous! You come to Magnolia and don’t get the banana pudding?”

En route to the airport, he urged her to try it.

“I ate whatever was left of his and I gave him my red velvet cupcake – and their cupcakes are not good,” she says with a laugh.

Thirteen years later, she hasn’t forgotten the taste of her first banana pudding, she says.

It’s a dessert that has a story, Raza said, and not just for her.

“People resonate with the banana pudding because they might have enjoyed it on a vacation or when they were children,” she says.

Says McCardel: “My grandfather loves banana pudding, so my grandmother would make it all the time for me and him when I was growing up.”

Originally from Miami, McCardel settled in Dublin three years ago.

Nostalgia drew her to Feed the Blob. “The nostalgia of it made me want to try it in the first place,” she says.

“Banana pudding is great but my grandfather and I talk almost every day and so they are a big part of my life,” McCardel says.

An early start

One Friday last month, Raza got up as usual at 4.30am to start assembling the puddings.

“It needs a good six hours of sitting in order to be ready to be served,” she says.

Feed the Blob officially started on 1 January 2025, but loads of work had already gone into it by then.

Research, reading, months of experimenting with recipes and ingredient combinations to minimize waste. “I didn’t expect so many layers of complexity,” Raza said.

She turns on the kitchen light of her kitchen. She takes vanilla pudding out of her fridge, gets a standing mixer out of the corner, and cream, wafers and bananas.

When Raza thought of the business, she knew she wanted to do Magnolia Bakery-style banana pudding, she says. But her own version of it.

“Their pudding is very, very sweet. It’s almost like, it’s almost like a sickly sweet,” she says, as she whips cream.

“I’m South Asian and the biggest compliment you can give someone about a dessert is that it’s not too sweet, so it was a real challenge,” she says.

She makes every single element of her banana pudding. At the beginning, there was trial and error.

“You kind of know the texture but then getting there is a whole different story,” she says.

She unwraps the vanilla pudding and adds it to the mixer. When the texture is just right, smooth but firm, she takes the bowl, puts away the mixer and brings in pint tubs.

Layers of deliciousness

Drops, as she calls them, happen every two weeks on Friday afternoons.

Raza grabs a cup and starts to layer. Cream, then homemade wafers, then thinly sliced bananas — and repeats, again four times, until the cup is filled to the brim.

In a way, the dish is shaped by her friends, she says.

“We would have tasting parties where I would have like four different boxes labeled A, B, C, D,” she says. “Everyone would try them and give me notes.

“It was a community effort – my friends supported me, and they were probably my first customers too,” she says, visibly touched.

For a while they just gave samples away to get people to try it, she said. “Then, people that I’ve never seen before that day or never heard of, showed up.”

After Raza finishes assembling the pints on order for the day, she leaves them in the fridge for her husband to handle and heads to her full-time job.

“He’s my biggest supporter,” she says.

Later, on Friday afternoons, the ritual begins. Strangers get an Eircode, choose time slots, and head to pick up their orders.

The first time McCardel went, there were three or four others picking up at the same time, she says.

“Everybody was just looking at each other, eyeing each other suspiciously,” she says, “wondering, are you also here for pudding?”