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The Kirkland Signature cheesecake, tuxedo bar cake, and tiramisu cheesecake are amazing.
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I wasn’t a fan of Costco’s strawberries-and-cream or carrot-cake bar cakes.
From its $1.50 hot dog combo to the giant slices of pizza, Costco is known for having great deals on its own signature foods.
Outside of lunch, the wholesale retailer also has an impressive dessert selection full of great deals. But are the desserts actually any good?
Over the past few months, I’ve been visiting Costco’s bakery section to try all the made-in-house desserts I could find.
Here’s how they stacked up and which ones are actually worth buying.
Editor’s Note: Product availability and cost may vary. The prices listed are what the author paid at the time the product was purchased.
Costco’s classic cheesecake seems ready to be customized.
Costco’s 12-inch cheesecake is a staple in the warehouse’s cakes and pies section.
Although $19 is a good price for such a big cheesecake, it’s one of the most expensive items I purchased.
The texture was so soft that my slice fell apart as I plated it.
I liked that this cheesecake wasn’t dense. Instead, it was incredibly fluffy with a texture that reminded me of a soufflé.
It was so light that it started to fall apart when I pulled a slice onto my plate. The taste made up for the messy slice — this cheesecake was super creamy and not overly sweet, with a slight tanginess to balance its flavors.
I can’t wait to try it again with fresh fruit.
I found the carrot bar cake around Easter.
During one shopping trip, I looked at desserts just a few weeks before the Easter holiday.
I found a pretty bar cake with layers of carrot cake and cream-cheese frosting, plus a smattering of toasted walnuts on top.
At $19 for a cake that’s almost 3 pounds, it seemed like an affordable option to bring to a holiday gathering.
I had high hopes, but the carrot bar cake mostly just tasted like frosting to me.
I love carrot cake, but I wished this one had more flavor and moisture in the cake layers.
In my opinion, they were quite dry and tasted a bit bland. I wished the cake had a more spiced flavor.
For the most part, I could only taste the sweet, tangy frosting, which was nice but a little too much for the cake.
The chain’s banana cream pie caught my eye with its caramel drizzle.
The banana cream pie was about as big as the other cakes in this section, which are 10 inches, and cost $16.
This pie blew me away.
The pie had a good balance of flavors and textures. The crunchy graham-cracker crust held together well and added a contrast to all the creamy layers.
I liked that the banana pudding had a natural taste, not an artificial one. The caramel on top added some depth in flavor, but it was subtle.
I wish there had been more caramel, and I think I’d slice some fresh banana on top for serving next time, but overall this was one of my favorite Costco desserts.
The chocolate-covered strawberries were available at a discount.
The chocolate-covered strawberries were in their own little cooler toward the front of the bakery section, and they were marked down from $13 to $6.
On this trip, I went to Costco one day after Mother’s Day, so I assumed these were leftovers from the holiday.
Some of the strawberries looked a little worse for wear, but I managed to find some that didn’t look past their prime.
I couldn’t taste much of the strawberries in these.
The strawberries selected for this dessert were impressively big, yet they were no match for all of the chocolate they were dipped and drizzled in.
With each bite, I only tasted the rich, hardened chocolate, despite how ripe and juicy the berries were. I’d probably skip these in the future.
Costco’s strawberries-and-cream bar cake has an impressive presentation.
Although this dessert was among the most expensive desserts I tried at $19, it was well worth that price based on presentation alone.
It has really pretty layers of strawberries, cream, and vanilla cake, plus striped white-chocolate decorations on top.
This cake seems to be a seasonal one that Costco sometimes brings back in the summer months.
The cake was just too sweet for my liking.
I wished this one tasted as good as it looked. I expected it to be sweet — it is dessert, after all — but this cake was too overly sweet to me.
I think it would’ve had more balanced flavors if it had a little less strawberry filling and thicker layers of cream.
The tuxedo chocolate-mousse cake was another gorgeous dessert.
Like the strawberries-and-cream cake, the tuxedo cake is a long, rectangular layer cake with a pretty design and white-chocolate decorations on top.
I loved the look of this $18 cake and thought it was the most attractive dessert I purchased.
The fudgy bits were my favorite part of the whole cake.
This dessert is extremely rich and dense, with chocolate in mousse, ganache, and cake forms.
There were fudgy, brownie-like pieces between the layers of mousse and they ended up being my favorite part of the dessert.
I’d like more of the vanilla mousse filling to balance out all of the chocolate, and I’d probably serve this with some strawberries for a fresh element, but this is a tasty and impressive dessert I would buy again.
A bakery staple, the chocolate-chunk cookies come in a pack of 24.
The chocolate-chunk cookies are a staple in the bakery section of Costco. I got 24 cookies for just $10, and I thought they’d be perfect to pick up for a potluck or other gathering.
They looked great, too — they seemed soft with some crispness on the edges.
The cookies had good flavor, but they need to be eaten with milk.
Although I prefer baking my own cookies when my sweet tooth strikes, these were a fine alternative.
The cookie was soft without falling apart, and I liked that the chocolate had a strong, sharp flavor to cut through the sweetness of the cookie.
However, these cookies were a little dry, so if I bought them again, I’d also get milk to serve them with.
What I thought were cupcakes from afar were actually some very fudgy “mini cakes.”
In the bakery section, I saw a pack of what looked like six cupcakes, but once I got closer, I realized they were pretty large cupcakes or “mini cakes.”
The Mini All-American Cakes are seasonal, and a few packs were available during my shopping trip to Costco.
One cake in each pack had a red frosting heart. Most of the packs had the red frosting stuck to the container, but I did find one package with an unblemished frosting heart.
Every mini cake included a generous portion of super fudgy frosting on top, and the pack of six cost $9.
Despite the cute name, this was one intense dessert.
I thought the tuxedo chocolate-mousse cake was chocolaty, but these mini cakes put that dessert to shame in terms of chocolate flavor.
It was so intense and rich I could only take one bite, and the chocolate flavor lingered for a long time in my mouth.
These mini cakes are best shared, and I’d need a lot of milk to finish even half of one. In the future, I’d skip these and instead grab a full-size chocolate cake.
The 10-inch chocolate cake was available in multiple different designs.
The 10-inch chocolate cake with chocolate mousse was available in a few different designs — no personalization needed.
There was a plain option, a birthday option, and a really cute springtime design with floral frosting decorations, which is what I ended up selecting.
This massive cake, which had light cutting guidelines for 16 slices in the frosting, was $16.
The mousse filling helped balance out the rich chocolate cake and frosting.
Although the chocolate cake and the mini cakes are similar, the chocolate mousse layer in the full-size cake added a much-needed lighter, creamy element to balance out the fudgy icing and rich cake.
Because of the added mousse, I’d be more likely to buy this cake again, even though I wasn’t a huge fan of the mini cakes.
Costco’s lemon-blueberry loaf looked great.
I picked up Costco’s 2-pound lemon-blueberry loaf in the spring.
The loaves looked incredible, with heaps of crumble topping and an icing drizzle all over. It also seemed like a good deal at $9.
This dessert offered bright flavors and a range of different textures.
I cut out a slice and was happy to see blueberries toward the top and middle of the loaf — they hadn’t all sunk to the bottom.
The loaf itself was light and spongy with a good lemon flavor, which paired well with the chewy blueberries and crunchy crumble topping. I’d happily buy this dessert again, and I’d love to try it warmed with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side.
Costco improves on classic vanilla cake by adding a cheesecake layer inside.
I love vanilla cake and cheesecake, so I was particularly intrigued by Costco’s 10-inch white cake filled with vanilla-cheesecake mousse.
The entire cake seemed like a great deal, too, at $16. It had a wavy frosting design that could easily be personalized with a message.
This cake was one of the best desserts I tried.
This was an instant favorite of mine, and I knew right away I’d buy it again for any celebrations I have coming up.
The cake was so light it reminded me of angel-food cake, and the cheesecake was rich, a little dense, and creamy. The thin frosting layer on top was just the right amount to keep the cake from being overly sweet.
It would be even better with fresh fruit on top.
The apple-berry pie included a mix of fruits and a (mostly) golden crust.
I was intrigued by this springtime pie, which is filled with apples, strawberries, and raspberries. It had a lattice crust that looked perfectly golden along the edges, but it was a bit pale in the center.
At $16, the pie was one of the more affordable desserts, especially considering how large it was at nearly 5 pounds.
This pie was one of the sweetest desserts I tried.
The Kirkland Signature apple-berry pie will certainly satisfy a sweet tooth.
I found the filling, which was very thick, gooey, and sticky, to be extremely sweet. Even just a couple of bites of this pie felt overwhelming to me.
The outer parts of the crust were perfectly crisp and buttery and melted in my mouth. However, the paler center pieces were soft and slightly soggy.
I could see pieces of strawberry and apple in the filling, but the raspberries seemed to have broken down entirely. I also noticed a lot of seeds in the filling; I didn’t taste or feel them in my bites, but they didn’t look the most appetizing.
Still, the pie was good, at least in small quantities.
The tiramisu cheesecake was the most expensive dessert I found at Costco.
Costco’s classic cheesecake was a hit for me, so I had high hopes for a tiramisu version of it.
This variety had a simple, but pretty, design with piped whipped cream around the top and a light dusting of cocoa powder to mimic tiramisu.
This was the most expensive dessert I tried at $24, but it seems like it could serve a pretty big crowd, given it’s 4 ½ pounds.
This was one of my favorite desserts of the bunch.
Costco’s tiramisu cheesecake was certainly worth the price.
The cheesecake had a crunchy, chocolaty base with a thick layer of coffee-flavored cheesecake and a top layer of whipped cream.
Its combination of fluffy whipped cream, rich and tangy cheesecake, and crunchy chocolate worked both texturally and flavor-wise.
The only things that would improve this cheesecake would be a side of sliced strawberries and a mug of piping hot coffee.
Overall, this was one of my favorite desserts from Costco.
There are only a few Costco desserts I’d skip during my future shopping trips.
All in all, I’d buy nine of these 13 desserts again.
There’s a tie for my favorite between the banana cream pie and the white cake with vanilla-cheesecake mousse. Both the classic and tiramisu cheesecakes are also high on my list.
I’d skip the chocolate-covered strawberries, strawberries-and-cream bar cake, the carrot bar cake, and the Mini All-American Cakes.
Of course, regardless of which desserts I’d buy again, I’d make sure to get them when I plan to be with friends or family because most of them were massive.
This story was originally published on June 3, 2024, and most recently updated on April 11, 2025.
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