After the obvious success of the cronut™ (aka croissant-donut, dossant, doissant, dosant, frissant, faux-nut), people wanted to contribute to the rising pastry hybrid trend by inventing delicious sugary-doughy mutations. Apart from the trademarked cronut, no one else, to my knowledge, attempted to copyright any of the hybrid pastry creation names.
Until Starbucks, through Rich Products, did just that. Early this month, Starbucks announced that, after sitting down with their bakers to discuss how to take their muffins one step further, they came up with the duffin. I found out about this from a tweet from Bea’s of Bloomsbury that I read on 5 October. I felt outraged on Bea’s behalf because earlier this year, around July, I had gone to the St Paul’s branch of Bea’s of Bloomsbury specifically to try the duffin. I even tweeted about it! I was even more incensed to find out earlier this week that Starbucks’ pastry products provider Rich Products copyrighted the name “duffin”. They claim to have done extensive research about the name. That surprises me because if you type “duffin” on Google, one of the top search results is Bea’s product. Starbucks and Rich Products have magnanimously declared that they wouldn’t stop Bea from selling her duffins. Gee thanks Starbucks, how generous of you, considering that Bea had her duffin recipe in a book that was released in September 2011!
In a tribute to Bea’s duffin, I baked my own batch of duffins from a recipe that was posted on the Channel 5 website. The recipe was reprinted from Bea’s book Tea with Bea with Bea’s permission – How do you make a duffin?
Have a go at making this! The recipe is amazingly easy to follow and the lovely duffins are ever so rich and decadently delicious!
Yellywelly 