You may ask yourself what a cruffin is. Australians will know what you are discussing. One clue is the –uffin which refers to the muffin and the cr– could be anything but turns out to be a croissant. So we have the cruffin, a hybrid cross of a baked product of muffin with croissant. Most would describe it as muffin shaped but with flaky layers of laminated brioche dough. For real authenticity, it should have French butter and simply fall apart in your hands. How many of us have had croissant flakes all over our fingers !
What turns it into a thing of beauty is a filling of jam or cream. I’ve seen some fancier versions with crème pâtissières and healthier versions with curd. Most are garnished.
The cruffin came about in 2013 and soon began to make its mark in fast food outlets. It is the child recipe of Lune Croissanterie who produced it for a coffee chain, Everyday Coffee in Melbourne, Australia. It has gained in commercial strength even flying in the face of gluten-free baked goods. Interestingly, we learnt the name, cruffin was trademarked by PF Brands of Delaware, a decade ago. It suggests they had already developed this hybrid but did not take it much further. Anyway, the Cruffin is now global but it really took off in San Francisco when it was trademarked by Mr. Holmes Bakehouse.
Mr. Holmes Bakehouse is not a shop that shouts out to you. You can find it Larkin Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The protagonists here were Ry Stephen, the youthful Australian pastry chef and the co-owner Aaron Caddel of Mr Holmes Bakehouse. These two produced a definitive cruffin which they have been marketing now for a few years. It’s the one baked good which excites enough of a crowd to wait from 6.30 a.m. on a Saturday morning for the place to open.
If you are interested in the fillings then we learn that s’mores, strawberry milkshake, peppermint, caramel cream and chocolate have all been tried.
Incidentally, hybrid crosses of baked goods are not that uncommon. We have the cronut which is a croissant and doughnut pastry, the muffles (muffle and waffle cross) and the duffins (donut and muffin). Marks and Spencer in the UK have launched their own version of cruffin as well as a few of the variants just mentioned.
Yep – certainly had cruffins and duffins in the state of California. Best bit was having such strong coffee it nearly had me buzzin for a week.