The New Barker Cafe Chocolate Croissant is to Die for

The Barker Cafe has given this Humanities concentrator yet another reason to live: the new chocolate croissant. On principle, I am against spending my own money at BoardPlus locations (even though I know that I’m sort of paying Harvard for my “free money”), but I might actually fork some over for this delight of a pastry. I have watched plenty of “Great British Bake Off,” so I am extremely qualified to detail why this croissant is a divine blessing.

Let’s start by reminding our readers what the old chocolate croissant was like. It was very similar to the kind that Starbucks calls a chocolate croissant — which is to say, it was actually a pain au chocolat. A smallish pastry square with two solid bars of chocolate running through the middle, the faux croissant (fauxsant?) provided a decent amount of satisfaction, even if it wasn’t the most filling thing the cafe sold.

The new croissant? It is bigger, better, and more chocolatey than ever. I could eat the fauxsant as a pre-class snack and still be famished by the five-minute break in the middle of a seminar. The new and improved version is a breakfast in itself. I need to take a five-minute break from eating it so I can pay attention to class.

It’s actually shaped like a croissant, for starters, which (thanks to Google Translate) means “crescent” in French. The tips of this decadent crescent actually meet, so puffy and fulsome is this croissant. The chocolate drizzle is a nice touch, and the first time I ate this I figured that was the only chocolate content.

I was wrong.

The middle of the croissant contains a chocolate butter-type filling — like Nutella without the nuts — which makes for the perfect mid-pastry surprise (sorry to ruin the surprise). The best pastry offering can be further optimized, however. As nice as the croissant is, sitting in a pastry case all day dries it out, so try out this treat earlier in the day rather than later. (Also, these babies run out. If you’re the one eating all the croissants for breakfast on Wednesdays, meet me outside Barker tomorrow at noon. We need to talk.)

See, I could have kept this pastry secret all to myself, but I’m eating one as I write this so I feel pretty magnanimous. That’s just the beauty of the chocolate croissant. Treat yourself. Love yourself. Croissant yourself.