Why Cubed Croissants Were A Recipe For TikTok Virality
It's been a banner year for croissants, and well, many things the Internet has dubbed "croissants," regardless of how distant the resemblance. We've put up with Suprême croissants, cruffins, and croissant cereal, not to mention Dominique Ansel's ever-popular cronut. But one croissant in particular has captivated food fanatics online, proceeding to go absolutely viral on TikTok: the cube croissant.
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The cube croissant was originally invented by Swedish chef Bedros Kabranian in 2018. But it didn't really take off until November 2022 when it was reimagined by head baker Mustapha Ait Elamouam at Le Deli Robuchon, a French patisserie in London named for the late, great French Chef Joël Robuchon. Elamouam's version, called "Le Cube," was quickly picked up online because of its aesthetic shape and bright colors. Though the enormous hype around the long lines surrounding Le Deli Robuchon each day, made up of would-be croissant snackers, surely didn't hurt.
What is a cube croissant?
Cube croissants are made using the same process as croissants. The pastry dough is laminated — or folded several times to create thin, flaky layers when baked – in an extensive process that requires multiple rounds of chilling to keep the dough at the correct temperature. But at the final stage, when a croissant would typically be rolled from a triangle-shaped piece of dough into its trademark crescent shape, cube croissants are instead created by stacking squares of croissant dough to create a cube.
Typically, the cube croissants from Le Deli Robuchon are filled with some sort of cream, which both adds extra flavor and contributes to their TikTokability. Videos of these croissants typically show people pulling apart the cubes to reveal their fluffy center, and a burst of colored filling. Flavors can range from the sweet (like pistachio, or rose and raspberry), to the savory (like truffle and comté, or avocado and salmon).
The copycat cubes
The enormous hype of Le Deli Robuchon's cube croissants has led to dozens of copycats around the world. The Asian-inspired Italian pastry shop Angelina Bakery in New York sells Nutella, strawberry, and pistachio cube croissants alongside their bombolones and cannolis. Croissanté in the Bay Area makes several batches of plain cube croissants per day to keep up with demand. Apparently, no additional flavoring is required to keep them flying off the shelves.
Forêt Noire in Vancouver sells copycat versions of several iterations of viral croissants, including the cube, the spiral croissant, and the cruffin. Rolls N' Cubes in Berlin, which is literally named for the cube croissants it sells, props themselves up as the "next gen. croissant" makers (per Instagram). In fact, it seems like the only place that doesn't have its own version of Le Cube yet is the humble croissant's home in France. (By way of Austria, of course.) Though the way things are going, it won't be long.