Forget cronuts, try a townie instead!

In case you hadn’t been paying any attention over the last fortnight, bakers everywhere have been talking about only one thing. Pinterest is overstocked with photographs captioned: “these are the MOST DELICIOUS THING!!” or “Best.thing.ever” and pictures of two-hour-long queues formed outside the New York bakery Dominique Ansel are tweeted daily.

Since it launched last month, the cronut – half croissant, half doughnut - cited by some as “the next cupcake”, has become one of the most tried-out recipes of the year so far. Even its name has been trademarked thus imitation products - doissants, croissant-donuts - are being tested daily. According to information from Bakeryinfo.co.uk, around 7,800 have been sold to date.

So could the cupcake be under threat from this new hybrid pastry? “Cronuts are called Yum Yums in this country and you can buy them in Waitrose. We’ve had them for decades,” wrote Hawksmoor steakhouse owner Richard Turner in an email to his business partner.

Either way, the cronut craze has led to a separate hype - for hybrid pastries. At the end of May, Buzzfeed ran a story entitled “17 Hybrid Desserts That Will Blow Your Mind” which included macanuts (macaroon/doughnuts), cheesecake-cookie-cakes, cake-pies and churro-cheesecakes.

Two weeks ago we challenged Bea Vo of London bakery, Beas Of Bloomsbury to create her own fusion food including the muggel (a muffin/bagel), a waggle (waffle/bagel), a muffle (waffle/muffin), a townie (tart/brownie) or a crapjack (croissant/flapjack).

“I always find that with combinations, sometimes you get the best of both worlds, sometimes it can fall really flat. We could some of those others but you would lose the best aspects of the desert in doing so,” says Vo.

The result? The townie was a squidgy, buttery, flaky mixture that warranted “oo”, “mm” and “a good balance of flaky and gooey” from my colleagues while the muffle was good but nothing special. “Doing this was interesting. It’s nice to exercise my creative bits and it was a lot of fun coming up with different ideas.

For the brownie tart, Vo wanted a short crust “which is quite soft with a buttery crispness to it” with her normal brownie mix. “But I needed to slightly under bake it because you want to have a bit of the gooeyness. It was the mince pie shell that we used which is really nice and complementary to the brownies. So it was quite easy to incorporate it.”

The muffle was created by modifying her existing waffle recipe, adding “a bit more spice, upping the butter content a little bit to make it crispier, and then the fruit. You can get a really nice crisp outside centre which goes with the syrup... It is something that would need to be served hot.”

Does Vo think the townie could take off? “Put the two together, it’s fine. It would be amazing in the shop. That will definitely take off.” You heard it here first.