Meet the 'cruffin' and the 'croggle', the food world's advance on the 'cronut'

You've heard of the cruffin and the cronut (a croissant crossed with either a muffin or a donut), but what about the croggle?

This spellcheck-testing pastry features at new Melbourne cafe the Crux & Co, where brunchers are furiously Googling to find out what on earth it is.

The Crux's pastry chef Louise MK Lee says, "I wanted to make the best croissant in Melbourne in the way that Lune has made the best". Kate Reid of Lune Crossanterie's in Fitzroy is credited with creating the cruffin – croissant dough plus muffin tin – in 2013.

"But I thought I needed something more," says Lee. "So I tried to figure out a hybrid, like the cronut or the cruffin. But they are already on the market – they're boring."

To make the croggle, Lee shapes laminated croissant dough into bagels, then boils and bakes them. They come in plain, poppy seed, blueberry and wholemeal – your standard bagel flavours – and should really have been called crogels or cragels to avoid confusion.

At the White Mojo cafes in Balwyn and the city, chef Ben Luo has come up with the croiburger – a croissant-burger hybrid stuffed with soft-shell crab, fried egg and house-made chipotle mayo that is so often photographed by bloggers it probably has its own Instagram account.

"Croissant is one of my favourite things and everybody likes soft-shell crab. So we decided to put the two things together," says Luo.

Melbourne is offered a subtler take on bready hybrids at Gontran Cherrier in Collingwood, just opened by the young French baker of the same name. Cherrier has a string of boulangeries in Paris, Japan and Korea; this is his first Australian venture.

The black squid ink buns and baguettes are a striking example of Cherrier's work.

"I wanted to create a monochrome range of bread," he says. "To complete the range I made paprika buns (red), curry buns (yellow) and rucola buns (green), and a brown molasses bun inspired by Russia." He also bakes a matcha scone and a chocolate crumble brioche.

What about Melbourne's cruffin/cronut/croggle hybrids?

"The cronut is incredible," he says. "It's a good combination of the croissant and the brioche. But I try to stay focused on the quality of the traditional French product. I want to offer a French product with French raw materials, so I import the flour and use French butter to make my croissant.

When it comes to croissant, Cherrier sticks to the classics.

"You have two styles of croissant – pastry chef style and baker style. When a pastry chef makes croissant you have many, many layers, and they are very beautiful and regular. More like puff pastry. But I prefer when it is really moist, quite chewy. It's my way. It's like my father's croissant and my grandfather's croissant," he says. "More traditional."