Name: Maryland Cookies Birthday Cake Minis
Description: Mini cookies containing coloured sugar pearls
Made in: UK
Bought in: Morrisons, UK
Cost: 6 bags of 19.8g for 99p

These mini cookies are intriguing. They’re the sole reason this site has two ratings. Because they’re quite nice, but they’re not very birthday cake.

What’s happened is that Maryland have realised that blobs of sugar are cheaper than chocolate chips, and if you make them brightly coloured, you can call it birthday cake.

And these are literally just that – Maryland’s normal cookies but with sugar pearls (basically balls of sugar coated in shiny sugar) instead of chocolate. If there’s been any addition of vanilla, then it’s hiding well. The colours are also pretty muted, because artificial colours are bad apparently.

I feel like maybe birthdays in the Maryland HQ aren’t quite as exciting as elsewhere. I suspect that birthday tea is the same chicken stew you had last night, but with 8 litres of food dye added. Excited children rip open their presents just to exclaim, “Why did you give me my old PlayStation but painted yellow and blue?”

Anyhow, if you’re not bothered by the name on the front, then they’re fine – the sugary bits actually add a more interesting texture than the usual chocolate chips which are so small they instantly melt anyway, but there’s not much flavour other than “sugar”.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cake-o-meter: 🎂