Caramelized Almond Croissants

Back in January of last year, I was talking to my friend Christine about what we could do as some sort of content series. Ideally one that would give us a creative outlet to put on an in-person event. We had just hosted our first Cookbook Banquet the previous month, which was an 100-person cookbook club extravaganza with Justine Doiron. It was completely insane and surreal but left us without any energy for about 2 weeks after and involved me storing 30 boxes of crap/supplies in my living room. I remember shepherding this one dolly stacked tall of those boxes over and over again (somehow defying gravity), bringing the never-ending supplies up from the street level and into our venue. I had to guilt my parents the day before into driving up from Maryland to help me put on the show. Somehow everything went off without a hitch (there was like a 99% chance it wouldn’t). Even with the incredible euphoria, I knew that I couldn’t do that again, or at least regularly.

Then Christine had showed me this one video by vic lauren of her at home café, tricked out with a coffee bar, from scratch coffee syrups, and a variety of curated baked goods. We felt like there was something there. An opportunity to create a new event, just in my apartment for our close food friends. We came up with the mental mood board pretty quickly.

1) We wanted it to be a potluck, where each of our friends would bring something homemade and inventive, inspired by the cookbook clubs we had been going to. 2) We would lay out the food in one big sprawl on my kitchen counter on a parchment paper roll, inspired by a bakery on the Lower East Side called Supermoon Bakehouse. 3) We wouldn’t really pay attention to the coffee bar at all. Just food. Store-bought coffee is just fine. 4) We would have a monthly theme.

And the rest was history. Our first apartment cafe went viral. This new model of potlucks captivated a year of internet foodies. I remember walking down the street in my neighborhood and running into someone from my high school class. She had told me she had even hosted an apartment cafe inspired by me. At the moment I realized, oh wow, my influence was a lot stronger than I thought.

The cafe moments got bigger: a latte art machine, a New York Times feature (which is now framed in my kitchen), an opportunity with Mastercard to host an apartment cafe pop-up with two dozen of my fans.

Christine and I kept hosting the cafes not just because the internet loved them, but because we also loved them. The opportunity to host a dozen of our food friends every month and eat the most incredible, inspiring, amazing food; hang out for hours chatting about our lives; enjoy a few moments of this beautiful spectacle. We were hooked.

I also loved the ability to feature regulars in addition to new creators each month (Mei Liao, Alex George aka LilyPCrumbs, CrustbyCarson, Paige Nickless, @irenechung.art, @sabbbern, Ben & Zikki, Danielle Sepsy, CAKE PICNIC, Keegan McManus, Halle Burns, Emerald Chan). Apologies if I left anyone out. There were a lot of you!

For our first cafe of January, 12 cafés later, it felt only appropriate to host apartment café’s 1st birthday party. Our own little infant child turning 1!! So special. And what better way to commemorate the birthday than by having everyone recreate their best bake from the past year. A challenge to push us to reinvent our past work.

Unfortunately, I had just recreated my 2 favorite items for my pop-up just a few weeks earlier (my lobster rolls and princess cake coupes). With those items out of the running, I looked back to Christine’s birthday cake I made for the bread & butter cafe. I thought it could be fun to do a visual interpretation of that cake yet change the recipe up. I decided to go with the flavor profile of one of my favorite pastries, the almond croissant. Croissants have been somewhat underloved at our cafes since they are so difficult to make. Honoring them in the layer cake felt like a much-deserved moment in the spotlight. My layers ended up being: almond sponge cakes, cappuccino diplomat creme, frangipane, caramelized croissants, and swiss buttercream. I also provided the recipe for the caramelized almond croissants on their own, which are incredibly addicting and (relatively) very easy to make. To garnish the cake, everyone got to put one of their items on top. A meta cake moment.

This is what everyone else brought:

• me: caramelized almond croissant layer cake, caramelized almond croissants
• Christine: chili oil foccacia with chive cream cheese (lunar new year cafe), apple fritter muffins (fall cafe)
• Erika: black sesame babka buns (fall cafe)
• Deepika Kalla-Paul: “corn blondie” zebra cakes (hamptons/nostalgia cafe)
• @arlynosborne: fluffernutter cookies (hamptons cafe)
• Zack: Dubai chocolate k’nefa bars (eid cafe)
• Allison Chen: pizza pockets croissants (nostalgia cafe)
• @dolcetta.baking: rainbow cookie cake slabs (italian cafe)

This theme had the ulterior motive of forcing people into remaking the items that we haven’t stopped craving since their initial feature. In a way, this plate was the most sentimental. A capstone of all of our achievements from the year. A marker of the friendships we’ve made and the sensation we created.

How I couldn’t do it without all of them.

For the love of apartment cafe,

Ryan