Milk Bar Birthday Truffle Crumb Cakes, reviewed

You don’t usually find cookies or cakes the refrigerated section of the grocery store, though you’ll often find ready-to-bake cookie dough. Milk Bar Birthday Truffle Crumb Cakes stand out from the rest of the refrigerated products that surround them because they look like already baked cookies tucked in between the pudding cups and cookie dough packages. Milk Bar Birthday Truffle Crumb Cakes – which come in Birthday Truffle Crumb and Chocolate Cakes – are ready-to-eat treats from Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar line, inspired by her well-known confetti cakes.

The truffle cakes come in packages of two and are just a bit bigger than your average candy bar. There are two cakes in each package. The cakes seem to actually be more like cake pops than regular cake, very dense and with an almost cookie dough-like texture to them. Most cake pops are shaped into balls, put on sticks and served fresh. These are flattened into discs, dipped in a white confectioners’ coating and rolled in streusel and sprinkles, then packaged.

The truffle crumb cakes look cute and brightly colored, but they’re just not as satisfying to eat as a real birthday cake or even a cake pop. They’re extremely sweet, and their dense texture means that they are both chewy and a bit dry. The streusel on top adds a bit of crunch for texture, but adds even more sweetness.

I think that there may be confectioners’ coating within the truffle cakes due to their dense texture – and the fact that a lower moisture content will keep them fresher for longer, unlike their freshly baked counterparts. White confectioners’ coating is also known as white candy coating and is frequently described as white “chocolate” made with a vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter. It is very sweet and much more stable than real chocolate, requiring no tempering. The chocolate version is slightly less sweet than the plain flavor, but not by much.

If you love eating refrigerated cookie dough out of the package, these are almost like dressed up pieces of cookie dough and you’ll probably enjoy the variety. If not, you’ll probably want to pass on these – or at least serve them with some hot, black coffee to cut all the sweetness.