The pastry cabinets at a new wave of bakeries display croissants that look more like intergalactic objects than traditional French pastries, as bakers strive to set themselves apart in a competitive market. Wheels dripping with pastel-coloured icing, two-tone striped croissants, rectangular Portuguese tarts and chunky crescents are some of the shapes spotted in Sydney and Melbourne as each city enters the post-cronut phase of baked goods.

The ability to “eat with your eyes” on Instagram and TikTok undoubtedly plays a role in experimentation. But bakers such as Yeongjin Park of Tenacious Croissant in Darlinghurst, Sydney, also bring their own cultural perspective and influences to the French craft known as viennoiserie.

Park studied pastry and bread making in Korea before moving to Australia and teaching himself to make croissants. Now he creates pastries loaded with ingredients including black garlic, charred corn, octopus and bonito flakes, inspired by his upbringing and travels, plus art and architecture.

“Fortunately, I did not learn how to make traditional croissants from anyone, so I think I can think more flexibly and come up with various ideas,” says Park.

His bestseller is a rectangular pastel de nata (Portuguese tart) that dials down the sweetness, adds miso caramel and is scaled up in size.

In Melbourne’s south, Drom Bakery debuted a month or so ago with three head-turning pastries that are inspired by the bakery’s name (Swedish for dream) and the fact its bakers wake up while the moon is still in the sky.

Queues snake out the door for the slender chocolate-hazelnut crescent and two half-moon pastries that stand on end, sporting raspberry or caramel drips of icing. Demand is so great, they’ve had to adjust their production from a planned 2500 pastries each week to 10,000.

Frenchwoman Agathe Kerr admits that her Earl Grey or coffee croissants at Melbourne’s Agathe Patisserie would be a little too bold in her home country, where she trained. But moving to Australia exposed her to flavours she’d never had before, such as pandan and matcha, sparking a creative chapter in her viennoiserie.

Named after Boulangerie Viennoise – which an Austrian entrepreneur opened in Paris in the late 1830s to sell crescent-shaped bread rolls popular in Austria –viennoiserie today refers mostly to baked goods made with laminated dough. Similar to puff pastry, it includes escargots and croissants, as well as enriched breads like brioche.

Cronuts and cruffins were added to the viennoiserie canon in the mid-2000s, as mash-ups of croissant dough with doughnuts and muffins. The current generation is even more maverick.

Drom Bakery had moulds specially made for its semicircle and crescent croissants. At Tuga Pastries in Sydney, a mostly Portuguese bakery, moulds are also essential.

Its tugatelle – a portmanteau of Tuga and the rippled Italian pastry sfogliatelle – is nearly as tall as an index finger at its peak, filled with the likes of chocolate ganache or mascarpone, and topped with fruit or marshmallow.

Making them is a lengthy process that requires a steady hand to cut many strips of dough to create the grooves on top, reflected in the $14 price tag.

“The tugatelle is a finicky one, but we love it. When you eat it, it’s really crunchy,” says owner Diogo Ferreira.

Producing laminated dough items is already time-consuming and physically demanding. There are several phases of rolling and folding to embed blocks of butter into the dough, with long stretches of chilling to stop the butter seeping.

Creating dough of different colours, says Kerr, adds another layer of complexity to croissants, whether it’s her raspberry-striped croissant or a coffee variation.

“The difficulty is when you add something like that, it will have an impact on the yeast. It doesn’t always rise the same, so we have to watch them more.”

What’s the pay-off for all those extra hours in the kitchen?

“If you’re a pastry chef, it’s pleasant to challenge yourself and find new flavours. They don’t always work out but when they do and people like them, it’s so rewarding.”

Agathe Kerr

Tuga and Drom are currently developing new flavours and maverick shapes.

“You’ve got so many ideas, you can’t put them all out at the same time. It’s a very slow process,” says Ferreira.

As the number of bakeries continues to grow in each city, it’s also likely newcomers will feel the need to carve out their own niche.

Classic viennoiserie shapes and how to pronounce them

Viennoiserie – vien-wah-zaree

A group of baked goods made with laminated dough, and the craft of making them.

Croissant – kwah-son

The original viennoiserie item, based on crescent-shaped breads found across Europe.

Pain au chocolat – pan-o-shoko-la

The classic shape is a rolled rectangle of pastry around two chocolate batons. A chocolate croissant is a croissant shape with chocolate spread in the centre.

Pain aux raisins – pan-o-ray-san

Unlike pain au chocolat, this is a spiralised pastry dotted with raisins and glazed. Sometimes called an escargot, after the shape of a snail’s shell.

Kouign-amann – quin-ya-man

Derived from the Breton words for cake (kouign) and butter (amann), the other key ingredient in this round pastry is sugar, which is sprinkled over butter and around the outside of the tin to create caramelised layers.

Torsade – tohr-sad

Named for the French word for twist, these are often scattered with chocolate or other sweet ingredients, but Australian bakeries have used the shape to update the Vegemite-cheese scroll.

Brioche – bree-osh

Roll the “r” when you pronounce this one, which isn’t as flaky as the laminated pastries above but just as buttery. It can be filled with fruit or chocolate, and shaped into braids, fluted rounds, rolls or loaves.