Photo by Matt Cohen.

If you had any doubts that our Long, National Dessert-Crazed Nightmare was over, you are sorely mistaken. This past weekend at H Street Festival, Batter Bowl Bakery served their own version of the cronut—Chef Dominique Ansel’s famed Dr. Moreau-like hybrid dessert that’s half croissant, half donut—and now, it turns out, Heller’s Bakery in Mount Pleasant is also selling something that looks a heck of a lot like a cronut.

But, like Highlander, there can only be one cronut, because it’s a trademarked name.

Heller’s Bakery owner Aleks Duni says that they do not sell cronuts. “We have no intention of any imitation of the cronut, cronut recipe or anything like that,” Duni writes in an email to DCist. “Our customers are calling them cronuts.”

According to Duni, their cronuts differ because they don’t fry them the same way Chef Ansel does and that they don’t have the same shape as the original cronut. “We simply glaze our croissants after we bake them to add another flavor to our croissants. We have glazed croissants and not cronuts,” Duni says. “Our customers are calling them cronuts.”

Oh really? Then what’s this I see here? Looks like Heller’s is selling something called a “Croughnut.” Clever.

Kind of hard to see, but they call them “Croughnuts.” (Matt Cohen)

Heller’s “croughnuts” run for $2.75 and are only available on the weekends. Fake or not, this writer can safely say that they are indeed as delicious as they look.