‘Just as delicious.’ This new vegan bakery rethinks croissants, pastries in Coral Gables
World-class baking instructors kept asking Carolina Molea why she wanted to know how to make croissants and pastries without eggs or cow’s milk.
I just don’t like them, she’d dodge.
She knew, from experience, that if she told them she was perfecting recipes for a vegan bakery, they’d give her “the look.” A trained chef and a graduate of the Cordon Bleu culinary academy, Molea spent more than a decade learning how to make cashew cheese, cookies, pastas, cupcakes and pizzas for her twin children, who were born with a milk allergy, so they wouldn’t have to see that look on their friends’ faces — the look that told them they were different.
“You don’t need to miss out on anything you crave just because you’re vegan,” she said. “It could be just as delicious, just as decadent.”
And that was the inspiration for L’Artisane Creative Bakery, the 3-year-old vegan bakery, which recently moved from the North Beach spot where grateful vegans found it early on to its new home in Coral Gables. A passionate fan base followed her there for her unwavering devotion to making pastries and baked goods that were as delicious and beautiful to look at as they adhered to being vegan.
“What we do here isn’t just food. It’s beyond that,” Molea said.
Molea had never considered how much milk and dairy were part of her life until her children were born with an allergy to casein, a milk protein. She and her husband, Jonathan, both Caracas natives, were living in El Salvador, where he started a telecommunications company. They had to order allergy-free milks from overseas.
When the twins started attending school, she sought to make versions of favorite dishes and snacks that didn’t use milk and found herself coming to the Miami area every three months to buy ingredients from Whole Foods.
“Everything that I could make from scratch, I was making for them,” she said.
The family moved here in 2012, and Molea, who had a business degree from Universidad Fermín Toro, went back to school, attending culinary school in Miramar. She worked in top Miami kitchens, from the Ritz-Carlton to El Cielo, even a brief two-week internship at nearby Bachour, where Antonio Bachour shows off his talents creating beautiful French pastries with a Latin twist.
Molea, who keeps a strict vegan diet along with her daughter, realized her growing skill with vegan baking could set her apart.
She began taking classes to hone her pastry skills, from the Valrhona Chocolate baking school in Brooklyn to an intensive course with French chef Daniel Boulud’s top pastry maker, Francois Brunet.
She spent the last four years perfecting recipes in Miami’s humid climate, which makes baking unpredictable. She uses a vegan “butter” made from palm oil and sunflower lectin to laminate her croissants. And she styled her pastries like jewel boxes to delight the eyes as well as the palate.
Her Miss Dior is a glistening, ruby red teardrop of decadent strawberry-white chocolate mousse. The Peach Melba is a still life with peach mousse around a raspberry center. And her layered mille-feuille look drawn from a textbook.
“It had to look beautiful and taste amazing,” she said.
And she has expanded the menu to include plain and filled croissants and an all-day brunch with dishes like a chickpea “tuna” salad croissant, croque monsieur and an Impossible Burger croissant. And during the pandemic, the bakery started shipping nationwide and doubled its business from the previous year.
Vegans who hadn’t tasted a croissant in 20 years sent her emotional messages on social media. Her staff followed her from North Beach to Coral Gables. She instantly had a network of fans.
“One person can only get so far,” she said. “You need a group of people that believe in your crazy ideas,” she said.
And she no longer shies from baking desserts that defy convention.
L’Artisane Creative Bakery
Address: 2526 Ponce de Leon Blvd., Coral Gables
Prices: Croissants, plain and filled, range from $4.25-$5.50. Brunch dishes, $14-$17.
Contact: Lartisanebakeryshop.com
