Maricsa Trejo makes the croissants of your dreams: ultra-rich, with a dark bronze burnish, perfect symmetrical creases, an airy interior, and a shattering dome. She makes them with dark chocolate tucked into the folds; layered with sweet almond and dusted with powdered sugar; or filled with ham and Swiss, essentially a Croque Monsieur without the béchamel. You could say we’re having a croissant moment. And Trejo is the queen.
Trejo was pastry chef at Oak, where she flourished under Lucia Merino’s direction, and then at Small Brewpub, with a stint in between in New York to work with pastry chef Stephen Collucci. While at Small Brewpub, she started making pastries on her own account. She had always wanted her own pastry shop, but her fiancé, then Small Brewpub’s executive chef Alex Henderson, convinced her to do wholesale, so she could focus on the making, not the business-owning. They bought a used sheeter to help with production and together they started La Casita Bakeshop, selling to coffee shops.
You can find her at pop-ups for a sample of her more time-intensive treats. She’ll have cruffins—the flaky, spiraled marriage of croissant dough in a muffin tin—in flavors like Boston cream, Key lime, and cinnamon sugar. Also, chocolate-cherry babka, with its whorls of dark against light; ridiculously good peanut butter and jelly doughnuts; and a pear-walnut bostock, that is French toast slathered with the luxury of walnut cream.
But it’s the croissants you seek, triumphs of lamination. It’s in that meticulous process—the folding of butter and dough into tight, cascading layers—that she finds magic. So, she makes croissants every night, sleeping in the wee hours of the morning, so you can shed crumbs in the morning and leave a buttery, golden halo in your memory.
Find La Casita Bakeshop pastries at Cultivar Coffee Bar & Roaster, Communion, Tribal All Day Cafe, Mokah Coffee & Tea, Native Coffee Co., Parks Coffee, and The Statler.
