Review: Crumbl's Birthday Lineup Is Too Boring For A Celebration

Nine years ago, in 2017, Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley began the Crumbl legacy of pink boxes and massive cookies, and just as you might expect, Crumbl is celebrating with a drop of weekly cookies. The flavors commemorating this preteen birthday include a Pink Sugar Cake, Birthday Cake Cookie featuring Oreo, Cake Batter Blondie Cookie, Dubai-Style Chocolate Brownie, Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake Cookie, and Strawberry Biscoff Cookie.

Many of the cookies took inspiration from the most iconic birthday treat of them all: cake. Though Crumbl often has very creative options on its menu (looking at you, Little Debbie cookie lineup), this particular weekly drop was different from what I've come to expect from Crumbl. Always eager to get one of these sweet pink boxes in my hands, I tried these cookies to see if you should stop in and celebrate with Crumbl.

A birthday should be an exciting celebration, so I would determine if these cookies are worth your time based on the creativity of the cookies, flavor, and texture. I was looking for a grouping that felt like a celebration of the brand, was enjoyable to eat, and reflected the great texture I love about a Crumbl cookie. 

The chain sent this collection straight to my door for me to taste each one. After taking photos, I divided the cookies up, quartering each one and making a sampler plate for myself and my husband. We tasted them together, and I took notes as we ate.

Some recommendations are based on first-hand impressions of promotional materials and products provided by the manufacturer.

One of the hallmarks of Crumbl cookies is that they are ever-changing. Week to week, there is a new menu release and a new opportunity to try cookies that the brand comes up with. However, as of January 2026, Crumbl began offering classic flavors that would exist on the menu each week regardless of what the rotating menu offered. These always-available cookies include a Chocolate Chip and a Pink Sugar Cookie. The Pink Sugar Cookie Cake, which came out as part of the birthday menu, was no doubt inspired by this Pink Sugar Cookie and its flavors.

This sweet treat is a two-layer sugar cookie cake with pink almond buttercream frosting. I was expecting the frosting in the middle to go all the way between the two layers, but unfortunately, it was only for decoration and didn't make it through the middle of the cake. The frosting was definitely the most interesting part of this cake, and the effect was tasty, but seemingly too simple to celebrate Crumbl's birthday. 

I would have imagined that the brand would use one of its more adventurous cakes to celebrate what it is known for. This felt like a very safe bet that delivered a rather basic taste profile.

I love Oreos, but if I'm being honest, I only love them because they're great dipped in milk. They need this addition to be worthwhile in my mind. So while I acknowledge that the Oreo would make sense as a base for a cookie, in execution, a larger Oreo-flavored cookie took away the ability to dunk, which is my favorite part.

The Birthday Cake Cookie featuring Oreo from Crumbl is an absolute win in texture with its warm cookie base and generous helping of cake batter cream cheese frosting, but the Oreo cookie taste is just not enough to be enjoyable without the milk dunk. For what it intended it to be, Crumbl executed it well, but the cookie is too close to an Oreo to be enjoyable simply because I couldn't dunk it the way I would have wanted to with this flavor.

When I think of birthday sweets, Funfetti is absolutely the first treat that jumps to mind. Yellow cakes smothered in frosting and sprinkles, it was the treat in classrooms celebrating birthdays, and Crumbl attempted to capture the same feel with its Cake Batter Blondie Cookie.

Like most other Crumbl cookies, this blondie cookie was an absolute win for texture. It had a nice balance of flavors between the cake batter cookie base and sprinkles, but it was ultimately a little boring. The best thing this cookie had going for it was how it looked, and that just wasn't enough to completely win me over with the cookie. 

With a collection of cookies celebrating a birthday, it felt overkill to have several cookies representing a basic birthday cake. There was an opportunity to venture outside of the box but still capture the delight of a sprinkled cake, and I wish Crumbl had taken it. Ultimately, it was fine but nowhere near extraordinary.

Unless you've been living in a food desert, there's a good chance you've at least heard of the green stuffed Dubai chocolate. You'll now find Dubai chocolate treats in Starbucks Matcha, a Walmart cake that may allegedly be better than the chocolate bar, and even in warehouse stores for Costco shoppers. 

Crumbl's addition to the Dubai chocolate madness is its Dubai-Style Chocolate Brownie. It's Crumbl's fan favorite spin on the candy bar that returned to mark the chain's birthday.

I enjoyed this brownie with all of its mixed texture goodness. It represented the Dubai Chocolate craze well and offered a welcome spin on the classic brownie. My husband, however, did not feel the same way. Granted, it was his first taste of anything Dubai chocolate related, so this brownie came with a side of confusion. He wasn't a fan of the texture or flavor combination, so while this was a fan favorite, it certainly won't be to everyone's taste.

I miss malls. I can't be the only one. The experience of walking around with a tasty coffee, loaded down with shopping bags, and ogling the Mrs. Field's cookie cakes is simply an experience lost to the internet age. Crumbl attempted to rekindle some of that lost experience with its Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake Cookie, a treat I liken to the types of cookie cakes I always longed to try on mall days.

I found this cookie more enjoyable than Crumbl's typical chocolate chip-style cookie, but it also had way too much frosting on top. This is deeply reminiscent of the classic cookie cake that has far too much frosting inscribing a celebratory message as you might on a regular cake. In any case, this was another instance of Crumbl feeling like it was simply riding the birthday cake wave for the collection. It might make sense, but that didn't make it creative or exciting.

Ever since I had my very first Biscoff cookie 30,000 feet in the air, I've been in love with the crunchy, slightly cinnamon-flavored, and totally delicious cookies. Crumbl seems to share my obsession and even chose to celebrate the cookie as part of its birthday menu. For as basic and unassuming as most of the other cookies in the lineup were, the Strawberry Biscoff Cookie was a welcome departure.

For this one, Crumbl took the already enjoyable Biscoff cookie and made it into a bigger version with a melty bit in the middle and a strawberry cream cheese frosting, finishing the whole thing off with a slice of strawberry. This was easily my favorite of the box, and though I'm not ranking the cookies for this menu, this was the easy winner if I were. 

It was the perfect texture with soft parts and crunchy bites, and even the fresh bite of the strawberry slice. I found it tasted mostly like a Biscoff cookie and the strawberry certainly fell into the background, but it wasn't overpowered by any means. I wish the rest of the box had felt as creative as this one.

With the exception of the Strawberry Biscoff Cookie and Dubai-Style Chocolate Brownie, this was one of the more boring Crumbl collections I've tried. The texture was great across the board, but the taste and flavors were a little on the dull side.

If you're eager to celebrate with Crumbl, I'd recommend getting a single Strawberry Biscoff Cookie or Dubai-Style Chocolate Brownie and one of the chain's sugary dirty sodas, but leave the rest at the bakery. There was just so much missed opportunity here. 

As exciting and interesting as the cookies were in the Crumbl and Minecraft collab (the last collection I sampled), I had very high hopes for how the chain would mark this birthday. The idea of just going with a bunch of different cakes feels like such a departure from what makes Crumbl great. Don't get me wrong; I love a Crumbl cake, but a birthday group of cookies celebrating a close study of cookies (rather than cakes) may have turned out better.

Crumbl's ninth birthday cookies are available in stores from September 21-26, 2026. You can order them in either large or mini dessert sizes. Large desserts come in pink boxes of single, four, six, or 12 packs for $4.69, $17.49, $24.29, or $46.49, respectively. Mini desserts come in three, six, or 12-pack boxes. The three-pack is $11.49, the six is $14.99, and the 12 is $28.99.

As part of the celebration, on September 24, Crumbl is running a promotion where you can order six of these desserts for the price of four. This means you could sample the whole birthday grouping but only pay for four cookies. The chain says you can order these in person at stores, through the Crumbl app, and on its website.