A Real Treat or Half-Baked?

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Spotted: a Rice Krispie treat/ice cream sandwich. The whole treat is dipped in chocolate to form a frozen shell. Credit Sara Jaye Weiss

Remember the cake pop?

In 2006, you probably thought it was a passing fancy, a faddish combination of cake and lollipop that had quickly disappeared into the netherworld of baby-shower catering. In fact, it was a canary in a coal mine for the far more powerful Cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid that, a year after its birth in a SoHo bakery, still draws a line of more than a hundred people every day and sells out by 10 a.m.

The Internet-driven fame of the Cronut has galvanized bakers and pastry chefs in other cities to replicate it; versions have been spotted in Scandinavia, Australia and Taiwan. Cynics (and the busy lawyers for Dominique Ansel, the pastry chef who trademarked the name internationally) see in this a flood of copycat get-rich-quick schemes.

But like major shifts in art, technology or fashion, it also represents an outpouring of creative energy that could change the genre forever. Smart bakers are abandoning the croissant-doughnut formula and examining their own pastry cases with a speculative eye. The race to invent the next big thing in hybrid desserts is on, and it is fierce.

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A mallomac, top, consists of a brown sugar meringue cookie pressed against a marshmallow, sealed in a chocolate shell; and a cragel entwines the flaky pastry of a croissant with the chewy dough of a bagel. Credit Thomas Liggett, top, and Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

“It’s like the quest to create a new smartphone, but in food,” said Mr. Ansel, who stands in for Steve Jobs in this simile. And the dozens of bakers who are busy inventing doissants, mallomacs, crookies and the like are app developers, locked in a fight to create the best new product for the platform.

“We started working on the cragel as soon as we heard about the Cronut,” said Jenny Puente, a co-owner of House of Bagels in San Francisco. In order to create a true hybrid, Ms. Puente spent a year working out the logistics of entwining the flaky pastry of a croissant with the chewy dough of a bagel, then boiling the result, as a true bagel must be boiled before being baked.

Many of the new hybrids seem slapped together and less than appetizing, like the scronut, an icing-slathered scone doughnut spotted at the Cheese Emporium in Greenport, N.Y. Like the man-beasts created in “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” they are not likely to survive for long in the real world. Others are more intriguing and within reach of the home cook; many were even invented in the years B.C. — Before Cronut.

Here are some of the most promising:

Scone/muffin

The scuffin, sold at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco and online by the owners of Frog Hollow farm, has a stout, sconelike dough formed in a muffin shape and a shot of fruit preserves in the center.

Mallomar/macaron

The mallomac, a French-style macaron from Dana’s Bakery in New York, presses a brown sugar meringue cookie against a marshmallow, sealed together in a chocolate shell.

Rice Krispie Treat/ice cream pop

Spotted at the all-Rice-Krispie-Treat boutique Treat House on the Upper West Side. Vanilla ice cream is sandwiched between thin slabs of Rice Krispie Treats, the whole dipped in chocolate to form a frozen shell.

Birthday cake/truffle

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Which hybrid dessert is your favorite?

Pick from the options below; we’ll share the recipe for the most popular choice at nytimes.com/dining.

A signature of the Momofuku Milk Bar chef Christina Tosi: yellow cake ground with cream cheese and rainbow sprinkles, rolled into balls and coated in cake crumbs.

Macaron/ice cream sandwich

The New York chef François Payard makes colorful rectangles of meringue and combines them with his innovative ice creams. For example, pale green pistachio meringues around pistachio ice cream swirled with bright raspberry sorbet.

Pie/milkshake

This is what happens at Hill Country Chicken in the Flatiron district when a miniature pie (like blueberry or banana) is dropped into a milkshake machine with vanilla ice cream and enough milk to blend it into a drinkable mass.

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Brownie/chocolate chip cookie

The popular Brookster at Baked in Brooklyn is a like a cup of brownie batter that holds a puck of chocolate chip cookie dough, baked together so they meet but do not mix.

Pain au chocolat/almond croissant

Jacques Torres, like other French pastry chefs, presents this combination at Almondine, his bakery in Dumbo, Brooklyn. As if dark chocolate folded in buttery pastry isn’t indulgent enough, spread it with almond paste and sprinkle on sliced almonds before baking.

Chocolate éclair/cake

This combination exists in Southern cookbooks and online recipes as a no-bake dessert made by layering graham crackers, instant vanilla pudding and canned chocolate frosting. But it begs to be rebuilt with classic éclair ingredients: layers of crisp pâte-à-choux, vanilla pastry cream and chocolate fondant or ganache.

David Sax, the author of “The Tastemakers,” a forthcoming book on food fads, said that for longevity, he would bet on the éclair cake. “Mass appeal with just the right degree of sexy,” he said. “It’s a classy thing and an everyday thing, French meets American, all rolled into one.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2014, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Real Treat or Half-Baked?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

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