Review: The Merry Menagerie Cupcake is BACK in Disney World

It’s the holiday season, and that means there are sweet treats EVERYWHERE in Disney World!

Christmas Tree in Animal Kingdom

We’ve seen lots of gingerbread and peppermint and plenty of snacks to try at the EPCOT Festival of the Holidays, but now we’re heading to Animal Kingdom to grab a photogenic treat that’s returning. Let’s check it out!

At Animal Kingdom this holiday season, you can find the Merry Menagerie Cupcake yet again! It’s a returning treat and you can get it from multiple quick service spots, including Flame Tree Barbecue, Pizzafari, and Restaurantosaurus.

Merry Menagerie Cupcake at Flame Tree Barbecue

It’s available from now through December 30th, 2022 and you can get one for $5.99. It’s made with gingerbread cake, cream cheese filling, and buttercream frosting. But the design is what makes it really eye-catching — it’s topped with a white chocolate polar bear and sugar snowflakes, plus blue sugar crystals.

We got ours from Flame Tree

The Merry Menagerie Cupcake is here to honor the Merry Menagerie — an adorable set of holiday puppets that roam Discovery Island throughout the season. If you’re planning a trip to Animal Kingdom in the next few weeks, make sure to check them out!

It’s made to match the puppets!

Plus, there’s a mama and baby polar bear to match the cupcake. How sweet!

The lil polar bear!

But let’s get on to eating! The flavor of the cake is overwhelmingly ginger-forward…so much so that it almost made us cough. We really liked the gingerbread cake in the past, but this year it came on a little too strong. It’s possible that the flavor may vary by batch and we just ended up with a particularly potent one. The cake was nice and moist, but the frosting on top was a little too sweet for our taste, mostly sugary and there was a LOT of it. (Which could be a good or bad thing, depending on how much you like it.)

VERY frosting-heavy

We cut this baby open and disappointingly, found very little filling inside. There was a bit more in the other half, but not by much. It’s a shame because the filling was by far our favorite part — if it had been on top instead of the frosting that we got, we would’ve LOVED this treat. It was sweet (but not too sweet) and had a strong cream cheese flavor. Delicious.

We would like more filling, please!

We’d probably like it more with extra filling, or if they swapped out the frosting for cream cheese frosting. It’s super cute though and might be a fun treat to try if you’re a big fan of the holiday puppets. Gingerbread lovers will probably really like it.

We’ll keep checking out the holiday offerings around Disney World, so stay tuned to DFB. We’ve been visiting all of the festive celebrations that we can find across the property, so if you’re coming to Disney World soon, stay tuned for our thoughts and reviews!

Click Here to See Our Reviews of Holiday Snacks in Disney World!

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