Life

Birthday Cake Cookie Dough Bites Exist & It's A MAJOR Upgrade To Your Fave '90s Movie Snack

by Callie Tansill-Suddath

Birthday is the best flavor of cake. Full stop.

In the past few years, the flavor of cake that was likely a staple at your childhood birthday parties has reentered the spotlight, as it should have long ago. No longer is the colorfully-speckled dessert being reduced to cheap children's food. Confetti cake has rightfully claimed its title as the standard birthday sweet treat. Accordingly, it has begun to inspire far more than cakes. One of the more notable takes on birthday cake? The reinvention of a classic '90s candy: Birthday Cake Cookie Dough Bites.

In an article for the New York Times published in 2016, Julia Moskin refers to millennials as "the Funfetti generation." She attributes the explosion of rainbow sprinkle-laden desserts to the fact the generation to which Pillsbury's original Funfetti cake mix was marketed is now grown. Renowned baker Christina Tosi, the creator of the Milk Bar chain of sweet shops, is credited in the article as leading the campaign to make sprinkles cool again. It clearly worked, as Milk Bar's most popular menu item is its whimsical birthday cake: a vanilla rainbow cake, with rainbow cake crumbs, sprinkles, and vanilla frosting, per its description on the Milk Bar website.

But the Birthday Cake Cookie Dough Bites are special in that they meticulously mesh the tastes of cookie dough, cake, and candy into one movie theater-worthy trifecta. Why have only one sweet treat when you could have three?

Distributor Vat19 describes the confection, saying, "These snackable sweets have the consistency of cookie dough and the flavor of white cake, all covered in scrumptious funfetti frosting. The combination makes these addictive treats taste like a bite of frosted cake, and the sprinkles make it look the part too! It’s all the tastiness of a birthday without any of the getting older." Snacking on these colorful little morsels will surely remind you of when Dunkaroos were aplenty and cake wasn't just for eating by the ocean.

Cookie Dough Bites have been a go-to cinema snack since the '90s — in fact. that is where they were exclusively available for a long time. While the standard chocolate chip was the only available flavor for a while, in the years since its release, parent company Taste of Nature (TON) has introduced Fudge Brownie Cookie Dough Bites and Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Bites, Cookies ‘N Cream Bites, Cinnamon Bun Bites, Red Velvet Cupcake Bites, and finally, Birthday Cake Cookie Dough Bites.

The bites are far from the only '90s snacks to get a revamp in the years since their debut. Trix yogurt, the unnaturally-colored dairy products of lunch hours past, is still available, but now only comes in two different flavors (each of which incorporate a cartoon character). Crispy M&Ms first hit store shelves in 1998. After being discontinued in 2005, devoted fans of the crunchy button candies took to the internet, creating "...a slew of 'Bring Back M&M's Crispy' groups on Facebook as well as petitions and phone calls to the company," per The LA Times. It would turn out the fans' persistence was not, in fact, futile, as M&M Crispy returned from a decade-long hiatus in 2015 — and is in fact the subject of a massive nationwide vote right now.

Then, of course, there are Dunkaroos. The mini cookie-and-frosting snacks remain — to many people's disappointment — unavailable in the United States. In her aforementioned article, Moskin even names the snack as a notable "Funfetti copycat." In Australia, the Dunkaroo recently received a chocolatey makeover, but those who cannot so easily hop over to the Gold Coast can likely fill the Dunkaroo-shaped holes in their hearts with a more grown up version from Walmart.

The Birthday Cake Cookie Dough Bites are an inventive take on an old classic. It is the perfect treat for when you want to have your cake (and cookies, and candy) and eat it too.You can find them online at Vat19 or Amazon.