Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Cheesecake Croissants Review

Although Pumpkins are thoroughly an American thing with a very long history of Native Americans using them for food, the Europeans took to pumpkins (and a wide variety of squash) soon after the Americas were “discovered” and seeds were brought back to Europe.

What’s not to love about pumpkins and squash? They are easy to grow. They provide a very nutritious food and of course, they are mostly bright orange! 

The history of pumpkin spice is murky but the best guess is that it originated somewhere in south Asia and was picked up by the British when they were exploring that part of the world probably 400 years ago. 

The range of spices we now know as the Pumpkin Spice blend was probably brought to the Americas in the 1700s where there are written references to cooking with the well known pumpkin spice mix for making pumpkin pies in New England.

The rest is history, as they say. McCormick Spices started selling the first commercially available pumpkin spice mix in the 1930s. Somewhere along the way Starbucks decided to make a latte with it and now it’s in everything…

But I digress, we are here to talk about Trader Joe’s mashup between American and French cuisines.

What are Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Cheesecake Croissants?

These croissants look weird coming out of the box. You get two of these square croissant things (might as well be puff pastry. It’s hard to tell them apart when they look like this.) and each contains a square of pastry and a round blob of what appears to be pumpkin cheesecake mix.

Each of these Pumpkin Cheesecake Croissants has about 290 calories, so they are pretty filling. I ate mine with some sausage I made on the side and it was a complete meal.

Remember these are frozen and you want to keep them frozen until you start to warm up the oven. There is no option for the microwave or air fryer, these must be done in an oven. 

These aren’t like the other Croissants that Trader Joe’s sells where you have to let them rise overnight. You bake straight from frozen which makes me think these are more puff pastry than croissant because the main difference between croissants and puff pastry is that croissants need to rise before you back and puff pastry doesn’t. 

Final Verdict

At $4.49 for two of these, they aren’t cheap! But something so good and decadent, I don’t mind paying the price. It’s not something I would eat every day. I could see buying a couple of boxes of these for brunch or something. Even having them for an after dinner dessert with a dollop of ice cream on the side!

When I was baking them, they had an incredible aroma wafting out of the oven. The dough puffed up nicely and got a nice shade of brown.

The pumpkin cheesecake keeps its shape and forms a round spot in the middle where it flattens out. It looks exactly like pumpkin pie filling straight from a cake.

These aren’t soft enough to cut with a fork, I had to use a knife to cut through them, but I didn’t care. The baked dough was fluffy and buttery. The filling tasted exactly like a pumpkin cheesecake. I thought it was exceptionally good. The filling wasn’t too sweet, which I think really sets these apart. I hate pumpkin pie which is too sweet. 

Also, the pumpkin pie spice wasn’t overpowering, which is a thing that can happen. I thought they nailed the spice blend perfectly.

All, in all, I thought these were one of the better pumpkin products I’ve ever had. I highly recommend them and I will give them 9 out of 10 Bells!

Ingredients