Crumbl Cookies review #88 - Strawberry Cake

Crumbl Cookies review #88: Strawberry Cake - visited February 12, 2025

I was originally going to skip this week at Crumbl. It's Valentine's week and I wasn't very interested in Valentine flavors. I like cutesy hearts and flowers as much as the next person (as long as the next person isn't all that into it) but most Valentine flavors are some sort of strawberry-based dessert. I like strawberries but as standalone whole fruit, not made into jams, jellies, extracts, oils or anything else Mother Nature never intended. Strawberries incorporated into desserts that aren't actual whole strawberries always seem to taste artificial to me. And I really don't like jam.

But careful scrutiny of the strawberry cake on offer this week didn't seem like there was jam in it, despite the description. A non-Marketing person such as myself might have rewritten the description to match the picture as strawberry adjacent: there might have been a bit of jam in it but we added sugar and other things so you can't really see the jam. Fine, sold.

What actually sold me on the cake was its aesthetics. I love that flower-rose piping on top. It's beautifully done and a piping skill I don't possess but always wanted to learn. It's just so pretty.

Second reassurance was the cake matched the picture in that there aren't random bits of strawberry or a layer of jam anywhere in the cake. Instead, it's a mildly flavored, slightly pinkish cake that was nice and fluffy. There is the tiniest bit of grit, possibly from the jam somewhere, but not enough to distract from the cakey texture. 

I liked this cake better than I expected but it still tasted mildly artificial to me and reinforced my preference for strawberries as a standalone fruit rather than incorporated into desserts. If you like strawberry flavor, you'd probably like this cake. It's not overly sweet and Crumbl does nice cake extensions of varying flavors. Not as good as the butter cake but similar in texture and (mild) flavor to the S'mores Cake. This has a $0.99 surcharge at my store so with tax, it was $5.93. Glad I tried it but don't need to get again.