Perfect for any celebration, these deliciously soft, frosted Birthday Cake Cookies are sure to be a big hit, especially for birthday parties!
Topped with smooth buttercream frosting and plenty of extra sprinkles, these cookies are festive and fun, just like a birthday cake, but in a more portable form.
These soft and chewy sugar cookies have rainbow sprinkles both inside and out, and they’re loaded with heavenly vanilla buttercream! They are festive and joyful, bright and cheery, and perfect for celebrating the next special birthday in your life.
Forget birthday cakes and birthday cupcakes! Birthday cookies will be your new go-to birthday dessert, especially once you see how simple they are to make!
If you like soft, chewy sugar cookies like these, you should also try my Frosted Circus Animal Cookies, and Copycat Crumbl Chocolate Cupcake Cookies with decadent chocolate frosting.
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Key Ingredients
- Butter: Be sure to use unsalted butter, and to let the butter sit out at room temperature until it’s soft.
- Eggs: When making cookies, the eggs should also be added to the dough at room temperature! This helps them to incorporate better into the mixture.
- Sprinkles: What’s a birthday cake cookie without some fun and festive color! Rainbow sprinkles are mixed into the cookie dough to create a funfetti style birthday cake cookie.
Why You Will Love This Recipe
- They’re the Perfect Birthday Dessert! Birthday cakes are great and all, but they can be tricky to make and serve, and they don’t travel well. These cookies have all of the sweetness and love of a homemade birthday cake, but in a single-serve format that’s much easier to deal with.
- Birthday Cake Cookies that you make from scratch are much cheaper than buying a birthday cake, which means that you can spend your money elsewhere, on gifts or party favors.
- Kids Love These. If you’re hosting a birthday party for your kiddo, know that their friends will all devour these soft sprinkle cookies in no time. Funfetti birthday cake cookies will be a tasty treat for any party crowd.
- Easily decorated to fit a theme. Instead of rainbow sprinkles and white frosting, choose colors that fit your birthday party theme. I make a similar recipe for sprinkle sugar cookies for Christmas.
Complete list of ingredients with quantities and instructions is located in the recipe card below
How To Make Birthday Cake Cookies
- Mix the Dry Ingredients: In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside
- Mix the Wet Ingredients: In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then add the eggs and vanilla extract and mix well.
- Combine: Add the flour mixture in two to three separate additions, mixing well after each.
- Add Sprinkles! Without extra sprinkles, these are just regular sugar cookies, so be sure not to miss this step! Gently fold the sprinkles into the dough so that they are well incorporated.
- Scoop: Using a medium cookie scoop (1 ½ inch, or #40), drop dough onto the prepared cookie sheets 2 inches apart.
- Bake: Bake in the preheated oven for 7-9 minutes, or until the cookies have spread and are lightly golden. Allow the cookies to cool on the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
- Make the Frosting: Prepare the frosting by beating the butter until smooth. Then add the powdered sugar gradually and beat until smooth, mix in the vanilla and salt last.
- Decorate: Add the frosting to a piping bag fitted with a round tip. Pipe the frosting onto each cookie and finish with extra rainbow sprinkles.
Top Tips
- Use the right kind of sprinkles. Regular rainbow sprinkles (jimmies) work perfectly in the cookie dough. You can also use the small, round, nonpareil sprinkles, but understand that they can bleed colors into the dough and potentially make a mess.
- Let the cookies cool down all the way. Adding buttercream frosting to warm cookies will not work, as the cookies will melt the butter! Be patient, and make sure that the cookies are ready for frosting.
- If you need more details on how to make the frosting, visit my full recipe for buttercream for cookies! It’s delicious on all types of cookies, including cut-outs and cookie bars.
- If you don’t have a piping bag, you can also spread a generous layer of buttercream onto each cookie before adding the frosting. Using a piping bag gives the cookies a professional-looking finish though!
- You can skip the frosting if you like, and add extra sprinkles on top of each cookie before baking.
Variations/Storing
Store frosted birthday cookies in a single layer in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.
If you’d like to make this recipe further ahead of time, I suggest freezing the baked cookies, without frosting. You can keep them in the freezer for up to 2 months. Before serving, let them thaw fully, and top them with freshly made buttercream frosting and sprinkles.
Other Birthday Treats You Should Try
No matter whose birthday it is, or the birthday party theme, we have all types of easy and delicious birthday cookie recipes for you to make!
- Easy Shark Cookies
- Cookie Monster Cookies
- Harry Potter’s Butterbeer Cookies
- Frosted Sugar Cookie Bars
Recipe FAQs
This recipe was tested and created so that you shouldn’t need to chill the dough before baking! If you find that it’s extra warm in your kitchen, you may want to chill the dough for a few minutes to keep it at normal room temperature, but otherwise, just mix and bake.
I liked the way that these birthday cookies look with a smooth spiral of frosting, so I choose a round tip. For a more textured look, use a large star tip instead.
Other recipes for birthday cake cookies use cake batter extract to really bring home that rich, buttery, yellow cake flavor. Because this recipe has lots of butter and real vanilla in it, I don’t think that artificial cake batter flavoring is needed. However, you can add a half teaspoon of cake batter extract if you want to.
These fun and colorful Birthday Cake Cookies with frosting and sprinkles are going to be the dessert your family asks for on their birthdays every single year! They’re just as good as cake, if not better, and easy to make for any special day.
Birthday Cake Cookies
Equipment
Ingredients
For the cookies:
- 3 cups all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 cup unsalted butter softened to room temperature
- 1 ½ cup granulated sugar
- 2 large eggs at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¾ cup rainbow sprinkles
Frosting:
- 1 cup unsalted butter softened
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- ¼ teaspoon salt
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C, or 160°C fan oven. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a Silpat baking mat and set aside
- In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; set aside.
- In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy
- Add in the eggs and vanilla extract and mix well.
- Add the flour mixture in 2-3 smaller additions, mixing well after each.
- Stir in the sprinkles until evenly distributed.
- Using a medium cookie scoop (1 ½ inch or #40), drop dough onto the prepared cookie sheets 2 inches apart.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 7-9 minutes, until cookies have spread and are slightly golden.
- Allow the cookies to cool for 5 minutes on the pan before transferring to a rack to cool completely.
- Prepare the frosting. Beat the butter in a large mixing bowl until smooth. Then add the powdered sugar gradually and continue mixing until smooth. Lastly, mix in the vanilla and salt.
- Pipe the frosting on the cooled cookies using a piping bag fitted with a round tip. Sprinkle the frosted cookies with sprinkles.
Notes
- Use the right kind of sprinkles. Regular rainbow sprinkles (jimmies) work perfectly in the cookie dough. You can also use the small, round, nonpareil sprinkles, but understand that they can bleed colors into the dough and potentially make a mess.
- Let the cookies cool down all the way. Adding buttercream frosting to warm cookies will not work, as the cookies will melt the butter! Be patient, and make sure that the cookies are ready for frosting.
- If you need more details on how to make the frosting, visit my full recipe for buttercream for cookies! It’s delicious on all types of cookies, including cut-outs and cookie bars.
- If you don’t have a piping bag, you can also spread a generous layer of buttercream onto each cookie before adding the frosting. Using a piping bag gives the cookies a professional-looking finish though!
- You can skip the frosting if you like, and add extra sprinkles on top of each cookie before baking.
- Store frosted cookies in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.
Nutrition
This website provides approximate nutrition information for convenience and as a courtesy only. Nutrition data is gathered primarily from the USDA Food Composition Database, whenever available, or otherwise other online calculators.
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