It was still dark outside when Tee Hardy’s phone rang Saturday morning at her home in East Baltimore. After speaking with her friend, she piled into her car, sporting a hoodie and slippers with a blue nylon folding chair in tow. By 6 a.m., the duo sat outside the purple bakery at 6070 Falls Rd., waiting for it to open two hours later.

Bonjour Bakery & Cafe, which dates back to 1998, has long been one of Baltimore’s go-to destinations for authentic French pastries, whether almond croissants dusted in powdered sugar or the painstakingly perfect bûche de Noël cakes it sells before Christmas.

But for the past few weekends, it has seen lines of customers stretching the block for a new menu item: the shop’s take on crunchy fruit mousse. The desserts resemble real-life fruits like mangoes, apples, pears and raspberries, and are encased in hard shells that give way to light-as-air mousse and tart fruit fillings.

The dessert trend, also termed trompe l’oeil sweets for the French technique meaning “trick the eye,” has roots in 14th-century France. For months, though, it has been gaining ground on social media and in bakeries in cities like Los Angeles.

“I’ve been following the pastry craze since California,” Hardy said. She was ready to pounce once it arrived in Baltimore. She made sure she was one of the first in line to try them at Bonjour, where the treats are available only on weekends for around $10 apiece and sell out within a few hours of opening.

Proprietor Nicha McInnes began rolling out — or more accurately, molding, freezing, dipping and painting — the new menu items just a few weeks ago. McInnes, who purchased the bakery from founder Gerard Billebaut just last year, says she taught herself to make the treats by watching videos on YouTube.

With their delicate chocolate stems and perfectly dyed exteriors, the carefully crafted treats appear fit for Marie Antoinette. But while other super-stylized desserts sometimes disappoint in the eating — as anyone who’s ever had a cake covered in fondant can attest — these fruit mousses may be the rare viral pastry that taste every bit as good as they look, with not-too-sweet whipped mousse made from thick cream surrounding tangy homemade fruit fillings.

It’s the dynamic mix of flavors and textures that makes them so delectably addictive, said Harley Peet, the James Beard Award-winning executive chef for Easton’s Bluepoint Hospitality Group. Pastries, because of their sweet and fatty elements, require acidic flavor for balance. “Everything’s soft and supple and sweet, so you have to have some aggressive crunchiness in there,” Peet said. Bite into a crunchy mousse treat and your brain goes: “I need more.”

Some variation of the crunchy fruit mousse has been on the menu at Bluepoint-owned P. Bordier in Easton since the high-end bakery opened two years ago. Right now, it’s a pear with yuzu and cream filling. “We just had an apple,” Peet said. But he recalls encountering the treats 10 years ago at New York City’s Le Bernardin. Many credit French pastry chef Cédric Grolet for the most recent trend, popularizing the fruit pastries for his 13.2 million Instagram followers.

Fells Point’s Sacre Sucre has also featured crunchy fruit mousses in the past, though not as a permanent menu item, said co-owner Manuel Sanchez. “We first created one in 2020, so it’s hardly a trend,” Sanchez said in a text message. “We just follow what feels right as we grow.”

As of now, there aren’t many other places to find them in Baltimore besides Bonjour, where their arrival was met with eager anticipation by the TikTok crowd. “I found them!” said a customer in an October TikTok video that later went viral.

Since then, McInnes has struggled to keep up with demand for the treats, selling more than 500 of them on a recent Saturday. She’s heard from people as far away as Hawaii requesting she ship the desserts. While her customers wake up early to buy them, McInnes rises even earlier to make the unbelievably labor-intensive dish, which take nearly a week from creating the filling to spraying with colors. She arrives at the shop around 4 a.m. daily to get started, and leaves around 8 p.m.

Still, she’s grateful for her success. The desserts have been a boon for business and have led to an uptick in sales across the board, with customers coming for mousse and staying for croissants and coffee. It’s “exciting for an old, established business,” said McInnes’ husband and Bonjour co-owner, Tom. “To get new people to walk through the door, like, that’s pretty special.”

Not everyone is happy about the new item or all the attention Bonjour is getting. “I just want to go get my coffee, but I don’t want to stay in line,” McInnes said one of her regulars has grumbled.

Hardy was tormented by the tasty aromas emanating from the shop while she waited in line herself. “They’ve been wafting croissant smell for the past two hours,” she said.

Others were there out of obligation. “I’m here to appease some children,” said Mount Washington resident Libby Sheain. Her kids, 13 and 9, were desperate to try out the trend. She arrived at the bakery at 6:30 a.m. thinking it opened at 7, only later realizing she had a 90-minute wait ahead. But Sheain made the most of it, even forming newfound friendships with her fellow waiters. “We’ve been laughing for the past hour and a half,” she said.

Once McInnes finally unlocked the door at 8 a.m., Hardy scrambled inside, where Bonjour’s small staff raced to take orders. Afterward, Hardy took a seat at a bistro chair to admire her haul.

“These are beautiful,” she said, pausing to take a video for her own social media account.