A bemused Paris bakery owner has been besieged by smartphone-wielding youngsters over the past year, keen to snap themselves with the latest pastry craze: the crookie.
A croissant filled with cookie dough might sound like a fistful of heart attack, but everyone knows it is going to be tasty, even when all they have seen is a viral TikTok video.
The crookie was invented by Parisian pastry chef Stephane Louvard in 2022.
Photo: AFP
It was “just something for regulars,” he said, until a video by Instagram account “The Ultimate Guide,” which specializes in Paris restaurants, drove sales up to 150 to 200 per day.
Then early last year, TikTok influencer Johan Papz filmed himself taking a satisfying bite into one of Louvard’s crookies and things went crazy.
“We had hundreds of people coming, most of them young women between 18 and 25 years old, smartphones in hand to take photos with them,” Louvard told reporters in his kitchen as workers rushed to spread cookie dough into croissants.
In the weeks that followed, the lines never seemed to diminish in front of the bakery.
Production is now between 1,000 and 1,600 crookies per day, and Louvard has hired two extra workers.
He is pleased, but somewhat bemused, over the craze.
“I mean, it’s a bit insane,” he said. “At some point you have to stop. It’s just some cookie in a croissant, it’s not some revolutionary invention.”
Thanks to TikTok, Louvard now has imitators around the world, with crookies spotted in Brussels, New York, Tel Aviv and Singapore.
Louvard said that he has no interest in filing a patent.
“What for? To find myself in court with half the planet?” he said.
It is not the first pastry craze to tickle the world’s taste buds. In 2013, New Yorkers slept on the pavement outside Dominique Ansel’s bakery after he invented the cronut — half-croissant, half-donut.
In 2022, the New York Roll, a mixture of croissant and bombolone, an Italian pastry, turned into a frenzy, with videos featuring the cake accumulating hundreds of millions of views on TikTok, driving a hunt for more baked crazes.
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