At first, it was hard to tell what I was looking at. Was that boomerang-like pastry a croissant? Was it oozing cookie dough? What in the name of Dominique Ansel was going on here, and why had it taken over my For You page?!
It was Le Crookie, a croissant-cookie hybrid that went wild on TikTok, inspiring people to make pilgrimages to Maison Louvard in Paris just to try the treat. The fervor reminded me of Ansel’s Cronut craze circa-2013, and while certain croissant-cookie mashups have existed before, none seemed to take the world by storm quite like this one. (Its creator, Stéphane Louvard, told the New York Times that interest has snowballed since he released the dessert in 2022, hitting a point where he sold 2,300 pastries in a single day.)
Suddenly, I needed a crookie in my life. Only my frequent flyer miles weren’t nearly high enough to let me jet to France on a cravings-based whim (le sigh). So, I did what so many TikTok-scrollers do: I made a batch (OK, multiple batches) myself.
The very creation raised so many questions: Did people really go to the trouble to bake croissants from scratch, as well as cookie dough? And how did the two meld together and bake in an oven without turning into a butter-leaching pile of partially cooked dough, like sugar-coated lasagna noodles studded with chocolate chips?
