There’s something in the air—can you smell it? It’s sweet, slightly vegetal, even floral. It’s corn, and it’s living rent free in the minds of bakers and pastry chefs around the country.
Corn mania can be loosely traced back to a single dessert. When it opened in 2022, New York City “pastry boutique” Lysée debuted a pastry named simply “corn.” It’s a tromp l’oeil dessert, an oblong, chubby ear of corn dotted with neat rows of kernels, encased in a pair of pale green leaves. The center is a corn-flour based cake, each kernel made of corn mousse, with leaves made from white chocolate. The pastry went viral, and stayed that way. “It’s been more than three years since we opened, but it’s still one of our best sellers,” chef and owner Eunji Lee says,
Now, chefs and bakers across the country are finding inventive ways to build corn into their pastries and desserts. An elote danish at Claude Bakery in Manhattan; sweet corn bingsoo at Noon Korean Bingsoo House in Los Angeles. In Austin, blue corn masa twinkies at Mercado Sin Nombre, and sweet corn conchas at CasaEma, one of Bon Appétit’s best new breakfast restaurants of 2025. TikTok is littered with tutorials and videos of corn cream lattes, and bakeries like 1 Golden Pancake in Queens are baking boundary-defying corn crossover desserts like their corn croissant egg tarts.
Just as it’s popped up in bakeries and restaurants, corn culture has put down deep roots in the content creator universe.
For Holly Haines, who goes by @ItsHolly on Instagram, corn desserts are something of a habit. In recent months she’s made pretzel sweet corn pie, corn gelato (in a sweet corn tortilla cup, of course), and corn tres leches.
Eric King (@easygayoven on all platforms), who developed his corn cream trifles using both kernels and cobs, using corn is as much about the seasonality as it is about its flavor. His take on a knickerbocker glory—a British dessert made from whipped cream, ice cream, wafer cookies, and fruit—uses peaches and nectarines bathed in a subtly sweet corn pastry cream. “It’s kind of grassy and kind of earthy,” he says. “It definitely cuts through sweetness really well.”
King’s corn pastry cream appeared in Erika Kwee’s sweet corn layer cake a couple weeks after its debut. Other recipes, like Justine Doiron’s (@justine_snacks) butter oat corn cookies, harness the kernels’ texture, which she says add a “chewiness and a texture to cookies.”
Chef Fátima Juárez puts the finishing touches on a pan de elote, a corn-powered dessert at her LA restaurant, Komal.
At Los Angeles’ Komal, one of Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants of 2025, corn arrives in another form: jelly. It’s a pre-hispanic Oaxacan dessert called nicuatole made from just corn, cinnamon, and water—the naturally present starch in the corn helps everything set into jiggling, jellied perfection. Chef Fátima Juárez tops the nicuatole with piped strawberry whipped cream and hibiscus, but a major flavor component, she says, is the corn itself. She uses a specific type of heirloom Mexican corn called chalqueña cremoso which gives the jelly a delicately milky flavor.
But, as she explains, corn is incredibly versatile, and Juárez’s nicuatole is just one of her corn-based dessert ideas. She’s dreaming up chocolate tortillas, corn cookies and conchas—it’s all about harnessing the unique flavors and aromas in heirloom corn. Some varieties bloom into a beautiful nutty flavor, while others have a sharp fruitiness like red berries.
Once you start paying attention to the distinct flavors in heirloom corn, “you’ll see the difference in the flavor notes,” Juárez says. “It’s just like drinking tea or wine.”
Juárez’s Komal is one of a growing number of restaurants across the country dedicating their menus to heirloom corn varieties sourced from Mexico. Restaurants like For all Things Good in Brooklyn, and Oro by Nixta in Minneapolis, one of Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants of 2024, are thinking of heirloom corn in terms of its sustainability as much as its flavor.
“It’s important to preserve the biodiversity of the corn and to support the farmers in Mexico,” says Juárez. But in the right hands, heirloom corn can become nearly anything. “You can serve it hot or cold, in bread, in a jelly, or in a drink. You name it.”
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
