First, there was the cronut. Then there was the crogel. So if you’re curious about what a cruffin might taste like, you’d better get to Taste by Spellbound as early in the day as possible.
The boutique bakery produces a limited daily amount of the croissant-muffin hybrids. Using a pasta maker, bakers roll freshly made buttery croissant dough into thin sheets, then cut and form the dough into muffin shapes to be baked in cupcake tins. When the flaky pastries are done, they’re rolled in sugar and filled with an assortment of flavors: butterscotch with pretzels, peaches and cream, bruleed banana dulce, lemon ricotta with berries. But when the cruffins are gone, they’re gone until the next day. The production is too laborious to make large batches, says owner Miriam Rieder.
The cruffin is just one of the indulgences at Taste by Spellbound, which opened in the Promenade Shops at Evergreen Walk last month. The South Windsor bakery is Rieder’s second, joining her original outpost in Avon. Each location offers an ever-changing spread of hand-crafted sweets, baked fresh daily.
At 24, Rieder is already a seasoned entrepreneur. Born in Albuquerque, N.M., she began baking when she was 10. Her family later moved to Portland, Ore., and then settled in Connecticut in 2006. For her New Year’s resolution in 2010, she vowed to start baking again, and created a batch of red velvet truffles for a Valentine’s Day party. Friends around the country began asking her to ship her truffles, and she started a website. “I got maybe three orders in 10 months,” she says.
But everything changed in the spring of 2011, after an on-air shoutout from Elvis Duran’s popular syndicated morning-radio show. In the 10 weeks after the Duran endorsement, she fulfilled 12,000 orders, quitting her office job “literally overnight.”
“I did the truffle thing for a year and I knew that it would either die down, or I would have to take it to the next level,” she says. She chose the latter, opening her first retail shop on Ensign Drive in Avon in March 2012. Truffles in flavors such as Hazelnut Heaven, Caramel by the Sea and Firecracker with ancho chile and Saigon Cinnamon were mainstays, but they were joined by cupcakes, tarts, bars, French macarons and cookie-wiches with Canton Creamery ice cream.
Rieder’s ultimate goal is to open a shop in New York City, so she considered opening her second Taste by Spellbound in Fairfield County, with the intention of building the brand in that region. But in November 2014, representatives from Poag Shopping Centers approached her about joining their roster at Evergreen Walk.
With the New York metropolitan area still on her mind, “at first I thought, no, I don’t really want to go across the river,” she says. “And the more I thought about it, and they sent me the information … it kind of just felt right, and everything started falling into place. It was meant to be.”
Each of Rieder’s shops is decorated in a fairy tale motif, but with subtle, elegant touches lending to the theme. Avon’s concept is “Alice in Wonderland” and South Windsor’s is “Goldilocks,” with understated visual cues referencing the tale’s three bears and their chairs and beds.
“We’re doing that to set ourselves apart from the mainstream,” she says. “We want you to come in, look around and develop the story … we wanted that essence of a fairy tale without it being kiddieland.”
The South Windsor shop celebrated its grand opening on Aug. 21 and, one day later, Taste by Spellbound made its national TV debut on Food Network’s “Great American Food Finds.” In the episode, hosts Andrew and Adam Erace visited Rieder at the Avon shop, where she demonstrated the labor-intensive process for her cruffins.
“When the Food Network approached us, we’d only been doing cruffins for about a month,” she says. Now they can’t keep them in stock — on a recent Thursday, the South Windsor supply was gone less than an hour after the store opened at 10 a.m.
Since New York pastry chef Dominique Ansel introduced his now-trademarked cronut, the hybrid croissant-doughnut has spurred hourslong lines at his Soho bakery and seemingly motivated Dunkin’ Donuts to create its own mass-market version more than a year later. Closer to home, Stew Leonard’s grocery stores in Connecticut and Yonkers, N.Y. created a “crogel,” or croissant-bagel. But Rieder says her cruffin inspiration comes from the West Coast, specifically Mr. Holmes’ Bakehouse in San Francisco.
“We don’t really do breads, we don’t really do laminated doughs, but we thought that it would be cool to do a cruffin. No one’s doing them around here.”
The treats rotate daily, with recent offerings like red velvet cinnamon rolls, blueberry buckle, stone-fruit cupcakes with brown butter frosting, miniature pear toffee butterscotch bundt cakes and coffee cake with brown sugar streusel. Confections, priced at $1 to $5 apiece, are baked at the Avon kitchen, then driven daily to South Windsor. Guests also enjoy a variety of beverages, including Caffe Vita coffee, Raus Cold Roman bottled espresso and Harney and Sons tea.
Taste by Spellbound also offers custom cakes in such flavors as red velvet, carrot, champagne and caramel, with choice of filling and buttercream or cream cheese frostings. Predesigned cakes are available in popular varieties such as the “German rabbit,” a carrot cake with German chocolate filling; red velvet cookie monster, a red velvet cake with a layer of soft chocolate chip cookie and cookie dough frosting; and Lady Lavender, with fresh berries, lemon and lavender frosting.
Rieder says she and her staff of 15 “have a lot of fun at work,” but running a bakery is far less glamorous than it might look to casual observers.
“You don’t see the reality of what goes on behind the scenes,” she says. She’s grateful for her family’s assistance — her older sister, Angel, is now working for her at the new location, and their mother handles the finances.
“We learned [life lessons] as we went, a lot,” she says. “With the second shop, we knew a lot more than what we knew with the first one. By shop 20, we’ll be pros.”
Rieder is ultimately looking beyond the bakery world — she’d like to build a fairy tale-inspired lifestyle brand, “like a Martha Stewart.” She envisions partnering with large retailers to develop products like cake pedestals, aprons, dinnerware, greeting cards and even furniture.
“I’d like to have my own TV show or talk show; the dream’s endless here. I don’t want just bakeries. I want much bigger than that.”
The new Taste by Spellbound bakery is at 87 Evergreen Way in South Windsor; its original is at 5 Ensign St. in Avon. South Windsor is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Avon bakery is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday, 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Information: 860-644-1181 (South Windsor); 860-284-0000 (Avon); spellboundgirl.com.
