Move over, doughnuts: flashy croissants are all the rage

At Supermoon Bakehouse, a new spaceship of a patisserie in New York’s Lower East Side, a line of eager humans often snakes out the front door. Inside, the stars of the show are laid out on a long, coral-hued terrazzo slab that’s flecked like a cross section of mortadella: croissants, colour-streaked and stuffed with a mélange of materials, lined up in Instagram-ready formation.

There’s the emerald-striped peppermint chocolate fudge croissant piped with mint chocolate chip cream and fudgy ganache, adorned with wafer-thin cracklings of mint-infused sugar; the twice-baked banana split croissant exploding with sous vide-caramelised whole bananas, melty banana caramel, and a torched hat of gooey meringue; and the blood-red-striated lychee-berry croissant with an oozy, jammy heart and a dusting of slivered, dried strawberries.

If these alien croissants sound like none you’ve ever heard of, well, that’s the point. Like over-the-top, mutant doughnuts before them – a trend Bloomberg’s food editor says must be stopped – croissants are the latest baked good to be made over by social media.

Supermoon Bakehouse is the brainchild of Ry Stephen, an import from Melbourne who comes to Manhattan by way of another croissant-forward establishment, San Francisco’s Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, which he co-founded in 2014. That’s where, a year later, Stephen’s recipe for the cruffin – a croissant-muffin hybrid – was stolen in a brazen midnight heist. Such is pastry-mania these days.

Schooled at the now defunct Paris bakery L’ecureuil, Stephen eventually decided to focus on croissants because he admired their adaptability and complexity. “It’s an enormous challenge every day,” he says, but once mastered, the croissant “definitely takes well to experimentation”.

The proof is in the clicks. Google searches for “croissant” are at an all-time high. More ammo comes from a quick peruse around Instagram, which reveals that bakers the world over are flooding their feeds with flashy croissants: An Asian-inspired salted egg croissant with a golden, sweet-and-savoury filling has appeared at Taiwanese chain Bake Code’s Toronto-area outposts. A vibrantly amethyst-hued croissant shot through with ube is on offer from small-batch producer Baker Doe in San Francisco. Naturally, there’s a matcha-dusted croissant, with a hefty electric-green custard filling from Top Impression Bakery Cafe in Sydney. And Hong Kong recently welcomed a charcoal-slashed croissant bursting with black sesame-infused cream at Big Grains. The list goes on and on.

It’s impossible to pinpoint precisely when this trend began – after all, croissants have been around for almost two centuries – but Stephen’s over-the-top croissant shop is not an outlier. Rather, his is a single example of a growing global obsession with croissants and their variations that can be said to have originated in 2013 with the pioneering Frankenpastry, Dominique Ansel’s Cronut. There are only so many potential hybrid pastries out there, Stephen points out. Now, bakers seem to be turning back to more familiar territory.