Now, he has found his Parisian boulangerie besieged by pastry lovers in search of “le crookie”, after his creation was taken up by social influencers on TikTok.
“It’s totally insane,” he told the Telegraph as his team prepared another huge batch of the high-calorie pastries in kitchens under his boulangerie Maison Louvard in Paris’ eastern 9th arrondissement.
“I was happy with my croissants that day back in 2022 and saw my young team making cookies and thought ‘let’s have some fun’.”
At first, he sold a few dozen a day at best. Interest picked up after a video posted by the Instagram account The Ultimate Guide, which specialises in Parisian restaurants, driving sales up to 200 per day.
Londoner Adam Sandford, 31, tucked into one outside the shop on Sunday without the slightest hint of guilt, having just completed the Paris marathon.
“I like this. It works. I love a croissant but if I can have a cookie as well, why not?” he said. He had no problem with the fact that he had found the place thanks to social media.
A group of Brazilian exchange students in their early 20s were ecstatic. “It’s all over Brazil,” said Ana Marinho, 21, from Rio da Janeiro and studying in Bordeaux.
Newlywed American couple John and Kelsey Healy, both 23 and from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, had made a detour after spotting the pastry on TikTok during their whirlwind Europe honeymoon.
“It’s very sweet but very good. It’s something new. Our French tour guide seemed appalled at the idea but we wanted to give it a go.”
Louvard denied it was sacrilegious to adulterate the classic croissant beurre, officially dubbed a viennoiserie, as its origins are Viennese.
A mix of croissant and bombolone, an Italian pastry, that went viral in 2022. Photo / Supplied
Beyond the “pain au chocolat”, this was by no means the first time the croissant has been morphed into a new portmanteau pastry, he said.
In 2013, New Yorkers couldn’t get enough of Dominique Ansel’s cronut – half-croissant, half-donut. Then in 2022, the New York Roll, a mixture of croissant and bombolone (an Italian pastry) went viral, with videos featuring the cake accumulating hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.
But Louvard said the quality of the croissant remained key.
“It only works because the croissant is a proper crusty homemade one,” he insisted.
It is then left to cool, cut open and cookie dough is inserted with more placed on top. It is then rebaked until the outer dough becomes crusty and the inside melts.
A crucial ingredient, Louvard explained, was the richly aromatic Mayan Red chocolate sourced from a producer in Costa Rica, whom, he said, cultivated cacao of a single varietal “like grapevines”. It is roasted for half the time of industry standard and at a temperature 20 per cent lower, removing any bitterness.
Compared with its classic rival, the croissant beurre – far superior to the croissant ordinaire made with margarine – offers an (admittedly illusory) light and flakey feel thanks to a technique called lamination, which sees a yeasted dough thrice “turned” or folded around sheets of butter, creating 27 layers of butter encased in 28 layers of dough.
Call me old-fashioned but this correspondent can safely say I prefer the good old croissant beurre. I’m frankly no fan of cookies (or TikTok for that matter) and a croissant is enough cholesterol already.
The queues at Maison Louvard suggest others disagree. But that’s the way the crookie crumbles.
