Weekend: Wedding Dress Codes, Decoded 👗

Has any food been subjected to more chaos than the croissant? In just the past year alone, the iconic pastry hit algorithm gold after it was stuffed with chocolate chip cookie dough (a truly great moment for the Franco-American alliance). And again when it was intentionally smushed (why???) and topped with everything from chocolate to avocado (we repeat, why???). Not to mention, the most recent and perhaps most questionable development, in which croissants are fused with onigiri (for the unfamiliar, those are Japanese rice balls filled with savory proteins, like salmon).

Of course, all this manhandling can be traced back to the year 2013, when pastry chef Dominique Ansel created the internet’s first celebrity pastry, the Cronut. Since then, the flaky pastry has become a vehicle for all sorts of crossbreeding (see: the Cretzel, Croffle, Cruffin, and Tacro — yes, a croissant-taco hybrid); shoehorned into spirals, squiggles, and squares; and miniaturized and sold as $50 boxes of cereal. No wonder Food & Wine recently asked: “Are Croissant Trends Getting Out Of Control?” The answer, of course, depends on who you ask. While croissant purists would probably say the question is about 10 years too late, fans like pastry chef Paola Velez disagree: “If we just stay stagnant in honoring tradition, we won’t innovate and make new things that people will love.” In which case, prepare for the Crownie and the Ice Cream Crone, both of which could be next.