This New Orleans Bakery Turned Cornbread Into a Cookie and King Cake Into a Croissant
Cornbread has entered its cookie era, and at one New Orleans bakery, that is only the beginning. Ayu Bakehouse serves a jalapeño cornbread cookie that pairs sweetness with a little heat in a handheld treat. Its king cake takes a similarly playful turn, trading the usual expectations for layers of croissant-inspired dough. The result is a bakery where familiar flavors show up wearing something a little less predictable.
Located at 801 Frenchmen Street, Ayu is the work of pastry chefs and co-owners Kelly Jacques and Samantha Weiss, who opened the bakery in June 2022. Their menu pairs French pastry staples with Louisiana ingredients and flavors drawn from farther afield. A butter croissant can share the lineup with a coconut-pandan kaya bun, while a cinnamon roll gets a coating of raw Louisiana cane sugar. This is not a wholesale rejection of tradition; it is a different way of working with it.
The distinction matters because Ayu’s personality comes from specific choices, not simply unusual names. Cornbread becomes a cookie, boudin gets wrapped in croissant dough, and chicory coffee finds its way into tiramisu. Each item lets the bakery pair recognizable ingredients with a new format. For customers, that means the menu offers both an easy entry point and a reason to order something they have never tried before.
A Cornbread Cookie With a Little Attitude
The jalapeño cornbread cookie clearly introduces Ayu’s approach. Listed at $3.75 on the bakery’s online menu, it turns cornbread into a sweet snack with a measured dose of heat. No one needs to guess what gives it that kick: Weiss says the bakery uses jalapeño powder. The goal is a gradual flavor change, not a blast of spice that overwhelms everything else.
“As far as sweets, we’re known for our cornbread cookie that has jalapeno powder in there, so it starts off sweet,” Weiss told Pastry Arts Magazine in an interview published in its Fall 2025 issue. “Then you have the flavor of the jalapeno and then you have the slightest kick on the back end.” Her description makes the intention clear: this is a cookie first, with the pepper arriving as a finishing touch.
That same willingness to rethink familiar sweets appears elsewhere on the menu. Ayu’s cinnamon roll uses laminated pastry, the layered dough associated with croissants, and is encrusted with Louisiana cane sugar and cinnamon. Its Tiramisu au Lait features homemade ladyfingers soaked in chicory coffee and rum, layered with mascarpone mousse. Neither dessert needs an elaborate explanation to recognize, but both have details that set them apart from a standard bakery version.
Weiss describes the foundation as classical training with room for invention. “We’re classically trained, but we like to take those techniques, use the flavors we love, and kind of map out our own new one-of-a-kind items,” she told Pastry Arts Magazine. That philosophy helps explain why the bakery still offers straightforward croissants and sourdough baguettes alongside its more individual creations. The classics supply the technique; the ingredients give Ayu its own voice.
Related: A New Bakery Brings European-Style Pastries and Coffee to Downtown Dallas
King Cake Gets the Croissant Treatment
Ayu’s Croissant City Classic King Cake applies that thinking to one of New Orleans’ signature seasonal sweets. Its product listing describes layers of laminated dough that turn a cream cheese king cake into a croissant-inspired creation. Jacques also discussed the recipe on Cherry Bombe’s She’s My Cherry Pie podcast, where the cake was described as incorporating croissant dough and a cinnamon cream cheese filling. The change is substantial, but the connection to king cake remains explicit.
A practical distinction for readers planning a visit: king cake belongs to Carnival season, not the everyday pastry case. Cherry Bombe describes the New Orleans tradition as running from Epiphany in January through Mardi Gras. Ayu also offers nationwide shipping through Goldbelly, whose listing includes a gold bean with the cake and explains that whoever finds it buys the next one. Shipping availability should be checked before ordering.
The bakery’s wider menu shows its creativity isn’t confined to dessert.The Boudin Boy wraps Best Stop pork boudin and a local pasture-raised boiled egg in croissant dough. The muffaletta breadstick packages meats, cheeses, and olives in a portable bread format, with a vegetarian version also listed. These savory items follow the same logic as the cornbread cookie: keep the recognizable flavors, then change how customers encounter them.
Not everything in the case is a Southern reinvention, either. The kaya bun brings in a different part of the founders’ story, with coconut-pandan custard tucked into laminated pastry. Weiss told Pastry Arts Magazine that Jacques’ family connections to Singapore and her fondness for kaya toast there inspired it. That detail gives the bun a clear origin and shows why describing Ayu only as a Southern-sweets bakery misses part of the picture.
Two Pastry Chefs, One Very New Orleans Stage
The partnership began well before the Frenchmen Street storefront. Weiss told Pastry Arts Magazine that she and Jacques met in pastry school in New York and later worked at Breads Bakery. They left New York in 2020, with Weiss moving to California and Jacques returning to New Orleans. Their conversations about their own business eventually turned into a bakery plan, though Hurricane Ida disrupted construction before Ayu opened in June 2022.
The setting also shaped how they wanted the business to feel. With live performances nearby on Frenchmen Street, the founders chose an open kitchen that lets customers see the production process. “We’re on Frenchmen where there are so many live performances, so we wanted to put our oven on display as our own live performance,”Weiss told The Times-Picayune when the bakery opened. Here, the baking itself takes center stage.
Behind that visible activity is an emphasis on freshness and consistency. “We like to bake throughout the day,” Weiss told Pastry Arts Magazine, explaining that even a customer arriving an hour before closing might find something newly out of the oven. The bakery currently lists opening hours of 8 a.m. daily, closing at 2 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays and 3:30 p.m. the rest of the week. Its menu also flags seasonal items and variable availability.
For all the pastry technique involved, Jacques offers a refreshingly uncomplicated explanation of its purpose. “We’re in the business of joy,” she told Food & Wine in its 2025 profile of her. At Ayu, that idea takes concrete forms: a cornbread cookie with a delayed kick, a king cake built from croissant layers, or a coconut-pandan bun with a family connection. The fun is not that these flavors are unrecognizable, it is seeing exactly what the bakers have done with them.
