24th April 2026
From going viral on TikTok to growing both larger and later at sister space Astrid Atelier a few doors down, SPHERE sits down with the woman behind it all. Charlotte – whose middle name is Astrid – opens up on the rise of pastry Pokémon, the secret to her knockout (tried and tested!) pistachio croissants and how learning to trust her team was the making of her.
I love aesthetics, I love food. They've always been two parts of my life, and I didn't go from one straight into the other. So there wasn't a moment, but they both have always been part of my life. And I think there's just lots of parallels between art that's wearable and art that's edible, making something beautiful and useful. I just really enjoyed both of them in parallel.
They come for the pistachio croissant, the cinnamon bun, the striped chocolate tart that we do at the weekends, and the bread. But also, since we've become a bit more known on social media, they just want to come. There are loads of bakery eaters now who want to tick places off their list – somebody called it bakery Pokémon.
That's like asking me to choose between my children because I’m really proud of everything we make. But if I had to narrow it down to one, I would say our bread. Matteo who’s now my executive chef – and I developed this bread together to represent everything we want to eat. It contains spelt and einkorn corn, because I'm British and he's Italian, and they're two heritage grains that are important from our backgrounds. We spent a long time getting exactly the right blend of flours, and it's a deceptively simple but technically difficult product to make. We sell out every day, and we've just won a gold medal for it.
It's probably the pistachio croissant. We do use quite a lot of high-end ingredients. Ingredient prices have risen so dramatically even since I started the business. The pistachio is probably our highest-end ingredient. But the nuts are very volatile in terms of pricing. Very expensive, very luxurious. And we use loads of them. We have a hazelnut version as well, which is a similar procedure. We use gold leaf in lots of cakes. We like a luxury vibe.
The secret to the perfect pistachio croissant is to start with the perfect croissant. In most bakeries, twice-baked pastries are made with leftovers from the day before – but we don't really ever have any leftover croissants, so we bake everything especially for our twice bake. And we don't soak it in syrup, which is something most other bakeries do, so it's much lighter and less sweet. We fill it with our pistachio cream, and I don't like the nuts ground too fine – the texture is there, you really taste them. It's just super delicious.
It's all about time and temperature, really. Precision in the execution, lots of time between stages. That's an ongoing challenge for the bakers. But the amazing thing about croissant pastry is that once you've perfected that, you can make it a different shape, you can fill it with different things and create essentially a new product.
Every day is a pinch-me moment. These beautiful rooms used to not be here, and now they're full of people working for Astrid, creating beautiful products and customers who've made us part of their lives. I've been blown away by how supportive people have been of the whole journey – how invested they are. Lots of people have been with me right from the start, from when I was at home not quite knowing what I was doing. That's been a really warm kind of feeling, and it propels the business.
Loads, actually. Mostly to do with scheduling the production, because we already making a huge range. The one that immediately comes to mind is the marmalade milk bun – a gorgeous product I'd made in homage to my grandparents who used to make orange marmalade. But it was a really soft dough and quite hard to handle and shape. I think it will make a comeback, really.
The whole thing is just a massive physical, psychological, financial endeavour – there isn't one challenge. Every aspect of it is incredibly demanding. First, I had to become confident enough in what I was doing to jump off the cliff. And then I had to realise I couldn't do everything on my own, so I had to trust other people to do things that have my name on them. That was huge for me. When you start a business on your own and you're the only person who does anything, it's really hard to let go of any of it. So that is my daily challenge – to release a little bit more.
We'd like to grow into the afternoons and evenings, and move into different ways of hosting people. We've run a few pizza pop-ups which were really fun, we've got an amazing pizza chef, we've got an alcohol licence so people can have cocktails and wine. The idea is to think how to continue to build this environment that people have supported so much.
For pastry perusing in advance, head to astridbakery.co.uk
