Sweet Insanity

I never met a doughnut I didn’t like and I’m not at all discerning about where I find them- either a chi-chi restaurant or somewhere alarmingly near skid row will do- as I’ll round them up anywhere I can because my sweet tooth will always surrender to an apple fritter . So when a friend in New York told me about a new foodie craze going on mere blocks from his apartment and it involved these sugary treats, I had to check it out immediately. A super-hyped hybrid pastry called the cronut is all the rage these days since it’s debut two months ago at Dominique Ansel Bakery in Soho.

Created by Ansel, a French pastry chef with an impressive background- having had a six year tenure at Restaurant Daniel as Executive Pastry Chef- a cronut is essentially the love-child of a croissant and a doughnut, taking up to 3 days to produce where Ansel whips up just 300 per day at his bakery. Made with a laminated dough similar to a croissant, they’re first proofed and then fried in grapeseed oil. Once cooked, cronuts are flavored in three ways: rolled in sugar, filled with cream, and topped with glaze- there’s usually one flavor for each month, and July’s mouthwatering offering is of the blackberry-swirled vanilla cream variety. Gulp.

But here’s where the real story begins. The cronut has become the most viral dessert item to date, sending New York foodies, sugar addicts and international tourists alike to Ansel’s bakery in droves- a sort of flash-mob for dessert-goers- where they start lining up at 6am, and wait for two hours…turning Spring Street into a before-sunrise scene. Third party delivery services are now getting in on the action- capitalizing on a huge trend when they see one- and the $5 dollar cronut has now become big business for Premium Cronut Delivery, where they charge $100 dollars for just one or $5,000 for 20…those crazy New Yorkers- but at least ten percent of their proceeds benefit the Food Bank of New York. There’s also an appetite for black market cronuts, where the going rate for scalpers is $50 a pop. And if you have absolutely no time- or desire- to wait, you can even cruise Craigslist for line waiters– usually laid off people looking for quick cash. I really don’t know how long cronutmania will last, however I did manage to get my hands on one of these sugar bombs recently…and it was explosive. www.dominiqueansel.com