Visit a Blue Tokai café this week and chances are you will find the viral crookie sitting plump and pretty among their baked treats. Crookie is a portmanteau of croissant and cookie and it combines the two for a satisfying and indulgent accompaniment to your cappuccino.
It is the latest hybrid version of the croissant that has become a blank canvas for experiments. There’s the crombolini which brings together croissant and bombolini; the cruffin fuses croissant and muffin; and the cronut is a mash-up of the croissant and donut. The crookie was invented in 2022 in Paris—the capital of laminated pastries. Parisian baker Stéphane Louvard who runs the boulangerie Maison Louvard on Rue de Châteaudun in the city is the inventor. He wanted to experiment with the classic croissant and stuffed it with cookie dough for a play of flavours and textures. The end result is a baked goodness that will cover you in a shower of buttery croissant flakes as you chew the soft cookie stuffing. Earlier this year, the crookie took social media by storm and several bakeries across the world added it to their menus. A BBC story on the invention of the crookie reports, “He (Stéphane Louvard) split the croissants in half and stuffed them with chocolate chip cookie dough, rebaking them just enough so that the cookie set. They were a modest hit, with about 100 to 150 sold each day, until a TikTok influencer got wind of them in February 2024. Ever since, Louvard has been working overtime to keep up with the demand, fashioning 1,500 crookies a day – and 2,000 on Saturdays.”
It has now come to India with bakery brands Suchali’s Artisan Bakehouse and Sweetish House Mafia. Visit their website or Instagram pages and you will be greeted with photos of the delish crookie. Or, walk into a Blue Tokai café in Mumbai, that has partnered with Suchali’s, and the crookie will tempt you to give it a try.
