Aside from jokes about the always-broken soft serve machines, people don’t talk about McDonald’s dessert. It’s an entirely different menu, and the Golden Arches’ most iconic items mostly lie on the hot food side. But McDonald’s dessert is also one of the most criminally underrated menus in the fast-food world. While few of us are hungry for sweet treats after polishing off a Big Mac Extra Value Meal, the dessert menu at Mickey D’s is worth saving room. Or, dare we suggest, stopping in for after dinner somewhere else. We tried the whole dessert menu, and here’s what to try.
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6. Dreamland Shake
This limited-time, pastel psychedelic shake is meant to bring you back to the McDonald’s cartoon universe of your childhood. And they are onto something, because this thing is so sweet you may start hallucinating Birdie and the Hamburglar. It’s a fever dream of a dessert that makes your head spin with the overwhelming sugar, and if you have kids, keep them far away. Remember, there are no more McDonaldland playgrounds for them to burn this off anymore. The blue “berry” shake and pink whipped cream are flavors reminiscent of 7-Eleven ICEEs—a vague fruitiness that doesn’t taste like anything in nature.
5. Sundae
McDonald’s soft serve ice cream (see #3) on its own is a decent dessert. Sadly, McDonald’s couldn’t apply the same quality standards to its chocolate syrup. Like a lot of mass-produced artificial chocolate syrups, this one tastes medicinal, with strong overtones of chemicals and Robitussin detracting from the beauty of the soft serve. You can add nuts and other fun toppings, but ultimately you’ll probably end up saying something along the lines of, ‘We shoulda just stuck to the ice cream.” Learn from my mistakes, and trust your gut.
4. Chocolate chip cookie
One thing McDonald’s does exceedingly well is deliver nostalgia. Burgers, fries, sodas—they all taste like we remember from childhood. But somewhere along the line, that didn’t happen with the chocolate chip cookies. We remember warm, fluffy, gooey chocolate chip cookies similar to Otis Spunkmeyer, but these taste more like the stale cookies in that plastic case next to the cash register at a bodega. They’re not bad, still sweet and chocolatey and scratch the chocolate chip cookie itch. But much like Thundercats and Chuck-e-Cheese, they won't be nearly as cool as you remember from when you were 7.
3. Soft serve ice cream
McDonald’s soft serve ice cream is like the Joel Embiid of fast-food desserts: Great when it’s fully operative, which it rarely is. If you’re lucky enough to find a working soft serve machine, this stuff can hold its own with any summer boardwalk treat, a cool, creamy ice cream that refreshes without filling you up. Vanilla is the classic soft serve flavor, and you’d do well to stick to the original – the chocolate can skew artificial tasting. No toppings or extras needed, this rare bird is a treat on its own.
2. McFlurry
The McFlurry occupies that narrow category of dessert shared only with the Dairy Queen Blizzard and a handful of other treats. It’s not quite a milkshake, not quite an ice cream sundae, but a scoopable frozen dairy dessert that hits in all the right ways. Oreo cookie is the move, as the cookies and cream blend better with the vanilla ice cream base, and the crunch is satisfying. M&M flavor is also available if you want a change of pace, and while I admittedly didn’t try that one, I can’t imagine it’s much of a drop-off.
1. Apple pie
No item on the McDonald’s menu, sweet or savory, surprises you with its overall quality quite like the apple pie. It has real chunks of apples, for crying out loud, plus a caramel-and-cinnamon flavor profile that’s perfectly balanced. Take it home, heat it up, and throw ice cream on top, and you could legitimately serve the apple pie at a dinner party and have people ask where you got it. There’s a reason it was the only dessert item to crack our list of top McDonald’s menu items, and the quality here is tough to top.
