Hybrid Pastry Smackdown: Crookie vs. Ruffin

From humble crescent to Tiktok idol

Croissants arrived in London with French émigrés in the late-1800s, but the age of The Hybrid dawned only after Dominique Ansel’s Cronut mania in 2013. Laminated pastry has since been pinched, folded and Franken-fried into cruffins, duffins and, most recently, the crookie = a croissant union-jack-stitched with cookie dough that blew up on socials last year. Hybrids promise all the comfort of the familiar with just enough shock to trigger the share button.

Today we taste two London cults pushing the trend into 2025 - one born in Parisian luxury, the other in a North-London lockdown micro-bakery. Who flakes harder?

Competitor 1: The Crookie at Phillippe Conticini, South Kensington

TikTok queues snake down Cromwell Place the moment the shutters roll up at 10 a.m. French pâtissier Philippe Conticini unleashed the crookie on London after its Paris virality—think butter-layered croissant sliced open, rammed with chocolate-chip cookie dough, sealed with more dough and hazelnuts, then re-baked for a fudgy centre and shattering shell.

One bite delivers textural whiplash: crisp lamination crunches, molten dough floods, toasted nuts keep things civil. Sweetness is dialled high but tempered by a saline edge in the beurre noisette. At £5.90 it’s indulgent but not bank-breaking by SW7 standards. Downsides? Eat fast—five minutes’ cooling and the centre sets into brownie territory, and Conticini’s giant-croissant crowd means your prize may arrive lukewarm if you’re back of the line.

Competitior 2: The Weekly Cruffin drop at Sourdough Sophia, Islington

Sourdough Sophia began in founders Sophia & Jesse’s dining room during lockdown and now sprawls across two N Postcodes with three more on the way. Every Saturday at 9 a.m., staff pass a tray of limited-edition cruffins—croissant dough proofed in muffin tins, baked tall and piped to order. Recent flavours include Pina Colada, Black Forest and a crowd-voted “Passionfruit Curd Bow”.

We scored the Pina Colada: feuilletage flaky enough to snow the pavement, rum-spiked coconut custard at the core, pineapple-lime coulis under the cap and a ring of toasted desiccated coconut. Sweetness rides lower than a crookie; butter is the headline, fruit the hook. £4.20 per cruffin feels bargain-adjacent given the lamination labour and the fact each batch sells out by 10:30.

The way the cookie crumbles…

Conticini wins theatre—there’s nothing modest about a croissant doing a cookie cosplay. Yet Sophia’s cruffin edges ahead on craft: butter layers stay distinct, flavour rotates weekly and the community vibe is unbeatable. Either way, London’s hybrid wave isn’t cresting yet. Guardian food writers already whisper about an imminent “bonut” (babka-doughnut). Watch this space.

Spotify’s AI DJ now talks back: revolution or radio-style gimmick?

Last month Spotify released its biggest DJ X upgrade yet: press and hold the on-screen button and you can now speak live commands—“queue Tokyo jazz for coding” or “give me 90s girl-group deep cuts.” The DJ repeats your request in velvety radio patter, then rebuilds the session on the fly. Powered by OpenAI language models and Sonantic voice tech, the host peppers transitions with trivia about artists, back-announces tracks and even apologises when it can’t find your favourite bootleg.

Early adopters report latency under two seconds and remarkably human genre pivots. A Reddit thread notes the system stops listening the instant you release the button - comfort for the privacy-anxious, though every snippet still feeds the recommendation engine. Tech writers praise the “algorithmic serendipity,” while others flag an awkward quirk: if your request conflicts with regional licences the background bed can hard-cut mid-song, a reminder algorithms still bow to rights lawyers.

DJ X isn’t alone. Algoriddim’s djay app now uses its Neural Mix engine to peel vocals, drums and keys off any track in real time, letting bedroom DJs create mash-ups that once needed studio stems. On the festival circuit, David Guetta has already “booked” AI Eminem for a drop, generating a deep-fake verse that set off both cheers and copyright alarms.

Giddy innovation or existential threat? Some analysts predict that a significant share of entry-level creative jobs could vanish within five years if generative AI scales unchecked. Radio presenters, club residents and playlist editors sit first in the firing line. For now DJ X is a parlour trick but it hints at a near future where every listener carries a personal, talking music director and the definition of “DJ” splinters once again.