This Chocolatey Costco Bakery Find Is Raising The Bar For Grocery Store Cakes

Even the most determined Costco shopper has a difficult time resisting the warehouse superstore's bakery. The smell of freshly baked croissants, cookies, cakes, and seasonal pies often hits your nose as soon as you enter, easily diverting you from the grocery list that you worked so hard on. While Costco's bakery has become known for its crowd-pleasing menu of pastries and baked goods, those moments when we spy something new on the shelf are often the best part of any Costco run.

The current belle of Costco's bakery is the Kirkland Signature Mocha Crunch Bar Cake. This rectangular marvel has been well-reviewed on social media, and it's been creating a sizable buzz among food enthusiasts online. Its construction is similar to that of the Kirkland Signature Tuxedo Mousse Cake both in shape and layering, but fans are saying that the coffee notes and crunchy wafer layer are setting a new standard for Costco's bakery. So how does this new Costco addition stack up against the competition? We tried it ourselves to see what's up with this popular treat.

Considering that the Mocha Crunch Bar Cake uses the popular Tuxedo Mousse Cake as its foundation, it's no surprise that this cake is a hit. The latter has long been a prime example of creamy textures and rich chocolate flavors, and the Mocha Crunch Bar Cake improves on that formula in two ways.

The Tuxedo Mousse Cake's moist sponge and velvety mousse make for a delightfully smooth eating experience, but after a few bites the lack of textural diversity is hard to ignore. The crunchy wafer layer found in the Mocha Crunch Bar Cake is a small tweak to the formula, but it goes a long way. When you can get a bite that captures all of the cake's layers, that firm but yielding crunch creates a nice textural contrast that makes it dangerously easy to eat multiple slices.

The mocha in the Mocha Crunch Bar Cake's title does a lot of work to improve upon the cake's chocolate-on-chocolate sweetness. Coffee and chocolate have long been complementary ingredients, and the subtle mocha bitterness does a lot to contrast with the cake's rich chocolate flavor. Much like the textural upgrade, the addition of mocha provides a bit of sophistication to the cake's foundational flavors. The Kirkland Signature Mocha Crunch Bar Cake brings some textural and flavorful diversity to the dessert table, which is always a welcome addition.