food-drink, openings
Melody Bakes sells trompe-l’œil pastries in Broken Arrow
Nagam “Melody” Hanoun’s shop at 800 S. Ninth St., Suite C, sells $10–$12 pastries Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.–2 p.m., or until they sell out.
The strawberries and mangoes at Melody Bakes are pastry.
Nagam “Melody” Hanoun, chef-owner, opened the Broken Arrow shop in June at 800 S. Ninth St., Suite C, TulsaPeople’s Jared S. Gleaton reported Wednesday. The specialty is trompe-l’œil — “deceive the eye” — pastries shaped like strawberries, mangoes, and peanuts. A chilled chocolate shell cracks into cake and ganache montée, a whipped mix of white chocolate and cream, around a center of fruit confit, chocolate, peanut butter, or caramel.
Hanoun told the magazine the idea started after she tried a trompe-l’œil pastry from L’Arc Pâtisserie in Oklahoma City. She grew up in Mafraq, Jordan, studied French at Yarmouk University, and graduated in 2019 from the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts in Amman, an affiliate of Les Roches in Switzerland. A six-month internship at Four Seasons Hotel Amman led to work as assistant chef to Prince Hamzah bin Al Hussein. She and her husband, Ammar “AJ” Jebreen, came to Tulsa in December 2019. “We left everything in Jordan,” she said. “We loved it here, and then we had kids.”
Melody Bakes started at home in 2021 with wedding cakes and custom pastries. The couple also ran Laffeh, a Mediterranean food truck, from late 2023 until September 2024, and closed it after Hanoun became pregnant.
Each of these pastries can take up to three days: fruit confit cooked and frozen, ganache rested overnight, then whipped, piped, frozen, unmolded, and dipped. Flavors include strawberry, mango, chocolate, pistachio, and seasonal combinations, priced from $10 to $12. They’re available Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., or until they sell out, which Gleaton reports they typically do. Preorders are paused because of demand.
Hanoun also plans to add halawet el jibn, sweet cheese-and-semolina rolls filled with ashta cream, a dessert from her life in Jordan. “For me, cooking food and making pastries is kind of my love language,” she told TulsaPeople.
This is a bakery note, not a Best Of pick.
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