Early September Disney Menu Changes Across Several Resorts

Every night we pull every Walt Disney World menu we track, hash it, and diff it against the last version we saw. Most nights that turns up a swapped side dish and a retired cookie. Tonight it turned up a cupcake that quietly became a completely different dessert, and it was not even alone.

The Mermaid Tail Cupcake is not the cupcake you remember

Since 2019, every published description of the Mermaid Tail Cupcake at Landscape of Flavors has said the same thing: a vanilla cupcake filled with pineapple, topped with coconut buttercream and a white chocolate tail. Our own August 1 capture says exactly that too, word for word.

Tonight's capture says something else. It is now a confetti cupcake filled with vanilla bean pastry cream, topped with vanilla buttercream and sprinkles, with the white chocolate mermaid tail surviving as the only original component. The price did not move: still $7.29.

No name change, no announcement. Same cupcake on the sign, different cupcake in the case. It also got promoted out of the Bakery section into Desserts, and that reshuffle is the only reason it surfaced in our change feed at all. A recipe rewrite under an unchanged title produces no event on its own.

The same food court did it twice. The Mater Chocolate Pit Stop, $6.79, went from caramel-chocolate mousse with a plain brownie to milk chocolate mousse with a cookies-and-cream chocolate brownie. Same name, same price, different dessert.

Jiko had the busiest menu of the night

Jiko — The Cooking Place at Animal Kingdom Lodge picked up two genuinely new items. We went looking for coverage of either one and came up empty, and every menu aggregator still shows the old lineup.

• Roasted Spiced Mushroom-Fig Flatbread, $15 — fig spread, pickled peppers, provolone, herbed goat cheese.
• Gin and Fig Cocktail, $17.50 — Bayab African Dry Gin, fig, lemon.

The more interesting changes never announced themselves. From the Oak Grill, the $62 shared plate, quietly swapped its Braai New York Strip for a Braai Bison Strip. The Jiko Salad, $16, dropped seasonal apples and pickled shallots in favor of za'atar tomatoes and crusted goat cheese. The Malva Pudding, $15, upgraded a chocolate garnish to a dark chocolate ganache, and the Short Rib Isitambu, $54, stopped describing itself as merlot-braised.

There was also a rename in the entrée section. The Roasted Seasonal Fish became the Pan-seared Seasonal Fish, same $52, same roasted tomato butter, mushroom ragù, and tomato confit. Same fish, new verb.

Tambu Lounge rebuilt its espresso martini

The Oceania Espresso Martini at Tambu Lounge, $17.50, is no longer a vodka drink. Grainger's organic vanilla vodka is out, and Kōloa Kaua'i Cacao Rum is in, alongside the same Mr. Black cold brew liqueur and espresso. If you order it expecting what you had last month, you are getting a different cocktail.

Tiffins finished what it started

Last week WDW News Today reported that the Chocolate Travel Cake had arrived at Tiffins but was not showing up on the posted menus. Our diff watched it appear on the dinner menu on September 4, and tonight it finished the job and landed on lunch as well.

The Chocolate Travel Cake is $14: chocolate-olive oil cake, fig-apricot jam, milk chocolate mousse, pistachio praline, yogurt kulfi, basil sugar. It replaces the African Pot de Crème, which came off both lunch and dinner tonight at $13.

Halloween arrives four days late, on paper

Disney announced the Vampire Mickey Cone at Swirls on the Water as available from September 4 through November 9. The official menu did not get the memo until tonight, when it showed up in Limited Time Offerings at $7.49 — pumpkin and chocolate soft-serve swirl, white sprinkles, and a chocolate Mickey coin in a chocolate cone.

And a few quiet goodbyes

Three things left the menus tonight without ceremony:

• Mickey and Minnie Cookie Art with Edible Watercolor Paints, $19, is gone from Amorette's Patisserie. The paint-your-own kit came with a Mickey cookie, a Minnie cookie, a palette cookie, brushes, and water.
• Nemo Cupcake came off the kids' create-your-own selections at Narcoossee's, from both the standard and allergy-friendly lists. We last saw it on August 21.
• Peanut Butter Cookie, $5.29, is off the lunch dessert list at Sunshine Seasons.

Tonight's tally across nine Walt Disney World venues: ten additions, ten removals, and seven recipe edits that changed a dish without changing its name or its price. Here is all of it.

Everything we caught tonight

* The same dish renamed. Our diff matches on title, so a rename always lands as one removal plus one addition.

† Not a new cupcake and not a discontinued one. It moved from the Bakery section to Desserts, which is what surfaced it. The recipe change described above rode along invisibly.

"Edited" means the dish kept its name and its price and changed underneath.