The donut vs. the cupcake
Donuts (or doughnuts, take your pick) are popular again, not that they ever really went out of style.
This article indicates that those luscious little bundles of fried dough are undergoing a renaissance, as well as a gentrification that includes something called the gourmet artisanal doughnut. Really. Examples of the latter include donuts with lavender-scented glaze, or flavors such as mashed banana-filled peanut butter.
Well, count me out. I actually only like one kind of doughnut: the sour cream glazed. And I only like them when they’re very fresh, and a bit heavy and rough-edged to give the right crust of crunchy, with many depressions and crevices in which the (non-lavender-scented) glaze can pool.
This exact type used to be readily available in the supermarket near where I live, representing a constant and not easily resisted temptation. Not only that, but a nearby bakery (which thankfully closed a few years ago) used to package up its unsold doughnuts late in the day and sell a bag of eight for about two dollars, and often that bag would contain nothing but the sour cream glazed variety. Dangerous.
A few years ago when the Krispy Kreme Kraze swept the country, I had to wait a while to get my first taste. But when I finally came across one, I was deeply disappointed. This was the donut I’d heard so much about? This airy thing that evaporated almost as soon as it entered the mouth? A travesty.
But worst of all is the cupcake. When I was a child I found them perfectly fine, but past the age of about eight I’ve never understood what the fuss is about. A cupcake is just a piece of cake with some icing, except there’s no layers and therefore no filling. So, what’s the big deal? Why have they become so incredibly popular these days?
And why oh why have they become so astoundingly expensive? At four dollars a pop, the things are ridiculous.
And stores entirely dedicated to them? I first encountered this phenomenon a couple of years ago in Greenwich Village. Nothing but cupcakes in the window, enticing aging and paunchy boomers to wax nostalgic and young and slender hipsters to contemplate the retro pleasures of the comfort food. It must hark back to something about childhood, but that’s as far as I can get with it.
Cupcakes are just grown-up doughnut holes that are baked instead of fried. I am shocked, SHOCKED, you did not know that.
Does all this mean you have a craving that needs to be satisfied today?
While I occasionally purchase doughnuts, they cannot compare to the homemade doughnuts I ate on Sunday nights at some family friends during my childhood. They had FLAVOR, not just dough w a lot of sugar and fat. Their heaviness would be comparable to the sour cream doughnuts you are talking about, Neo.
The fascination with cupcakes is not something I share.
Necco wafers and candy corn are given a thumbs up, while Krispy Kreme donuts are labeled a travesty?
Oh neo, I follow your politics well, but I’m afraid we are on the opposite ends of the culinary spectrum!
By far, the best donut I ever ate came from a small shop at SoundView Beach in Old Lyme, CT. During the Summer months, one must be ready to wait in a long line for the place to open. The glazed donut is out of this world! Puts Krispy Kreme to shame.
This should send you into a sugar and fat induced coma: deep fried twinkies.
Doughnuts, aye. Crisp exteriors, aye. A cruller is nice for that. Cupcakes are indeed pointless.
I believe I have come to enjoy Krispy Kreme because I reframe it as a completely different kind of doughnut, more related to a French cruller.
But really, even a bad doughnut is still (!)A Donut(!)
Gourmet cupcakes now often have filling in them. Still expensive though.
To me, the point of a cupcake is to be rich in the way that cakes can’t because more than a few bites’ worth would be overwhelming.
The prized confection of my marijuana-enhanced college years was Spudnuts–doughnuts made with potato flour.
Check out the R. Crumb-like icon: a smiling doughnut tipping a top hat!
Krispy Kreme a travesty? Truly that attitude is a travesty! KK doughnuts are made to be the minimal dough structure necessary to support the fat and sugar glaze. The Essentials. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Finally, a topic I can sink my teeth into! (har har) I actually have found myself increasingly attracted to the cupcake. I didn’t realize that was part of a trend or anything, but when I feel like indulging myself, I pick up a few from the local bakery (I do not pay $4 per cupcake, however).
I think the appeal (for me) is the soft, airyness of the cake, combined with the decadent frosting. To be successful, the frosting should not be gritty-sweet, nor should it be too heavy.
Although I am a great cook, I do not bake (except for holiday breads). There are only two of us so a full-sized cake would go stale long before we finished it. The cupcake is a great solution for singles or small families.
Donuts? Like ’em too — fresh raised glazed or apply fritters (not strictly a donut) are my favorites — but I try to avoid them. Too fattening. When I do indulge, I go for Portugese “donuts” called malasadas. They’ve also been adopted by the Hawaiians so if you have an L & L Hawaiian Barbecue near you (they are pretty common here in SoCal) you can pick them up. But eat them fresh. Like most good fried foods, they implode over time!
I can’t believe you ate these things. No, really. A woman with so willowy figure can’t be familiar with such carbo-sugary concoctions!
The best donuts I have ever ate where Spudnuts, donuts made with potato flour, super awesome, googling shows there are many around the country, check them out Neo next time in LA.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS308&q=spudnuts+donuts&start=10&sa=N
As for cup cakes, make them! the best recipe I use is the one on the back of the Hershey’s Cocoa can for chocolate cake, which is also my favorite recipe for chocolate cake, its been on there forever, hiding in plain site, all by scratch of course, including the frosting.
http://www.hersheys.com/recipes/recipes/detail.asp?id=184
read the reviews.
Mix in the boiling water well before pouring. Make 30 and give some away if they are too many or you could half the recipe They never last long around my house.
I’m the only one who doesn’t like doughnuts in our family.
There’s one cupcake the family likes:
From the Death by Chocolate cookbook – Granny Twitchell’s Secret Chocolate Cupcake recipe. Chocolate, cocoa (I think), chocolate chips and cream (instead of butter). Oh and some sugar. Frosted with ganache – heat cream, add bittersweet chips, stir until smooth, dip cupcakes.
I can only eat half of one at a time. Very very rich. But I’ll bet the ones sold for $4 aren’t nearly as good.
“Krispy Kremes” are not doughnuts or donuts. E#nd of discussion.
I like lots of donuts but my favorites are lemon-filled, chocolate-dipped raised, followed by lemon-filled, raspberry-filled, chocolate dipped (all raised) and most cake, buttermilk or “old fashioned”.
You really should try the emon-filled, chocolate-dipped raised if you can find them (Winchell’s, Walmart, HyVee and Bakers will do them to order, Petit’s will not even as pay-extra-in-advance in large quantities).
To give it a name after the long winded explanation last time…
the nekko smoothie effect…
when marketing people mash things in some bizarre way as, what they think, invention is. a cargo cult version of inspiration and design, backed by more marketing than substance.
cheese steaks in philly were an invention, the original french dip was an invention, hersheys chockolate is an accident, etc..
its capital with no substance to fill it. money chasing something but cant find what to really do with it. no way (for them) to really judge real inventions or potential (ever see the art they buy?), so they hire a marketing firm to create such. they get mash up and marketing as i call it. you get fads.
when i am out taking pics at events (havent in a while now, will do so february fashion week), you can see lots of attempts to do this. just most of them dont catch…
then sometimes a few famous people will pick it up at the event cause its free. .. i get a few shots… people see it… they follow their “friends/leaders” as their brains see it dually, the artificial non relationship, and the parts where the brain still thinks its a relationship beacuse conciousness doesnt reach in and control the rest of things and have ways of qualifying the information. (so even though they can assemble the information and remember its not real. when stored all over, the part of real not real doesnt follow all around, its just a quality like red, or soft that exists when the memories are assembled again in concious perception – which is why you cant really turn off or claim that propaganda doesnt work because you know its propaganda. seems reason and factual correlation can tag information enough so that it is a kind of defense against propaganda, but that would just mean that not everyone is receptive to the same presentation of message, not that they are immune)..
[and a few other things like underwear on the outside might have been bets, dares, or tests about proving how stupid we appear to be from that distance – look how that religion started on a bet]
Doughnuts! Oh, man … I don’t dare eat the things now, with weight and blood sugar both running too high, but way back when, in the 1980s, when I was working at Bell Labs Holmdel, their cafeteria had jelly doughnuts to die for at breakfast. The filling would come apart in lumps, the doughnut was lightly tanned, and it was covered in granulated sugar that actually prickled slightly when you bit into it. They were just slightly chewy, and if you weren’t careful you could punch right through the side into the jelly part.
Those were the days. Those were the days.
Ah, fresh apple fritters. 500 Calories of sugary fried awesomeness.
I mean, if you are going to go and eat something like that, why settle for a mere cake donut?
Doughnuts are coming back because people found the “new age” replacements (bagels) so unsatisfying. I noticed cops stopped hanging out in doughnut shops and started going to bagel stores. Now, they’re back to doughnuts and coffee (not decaf).
Krispy Kremes are too small for the price. They do one thing right, though. They have chocolate glazed like Winchell’s in the old days. Somewhere, they lost the “glaze” and bacame simply “chocolate raised”. Now if KK could make a doughnut for someone bigger than a mouse, they could make No.1 on Fortune’s 500.
“I actually only like one kind of doughnut: sour cream glazed.”
Is there nothing about you that I don’t like?
Then there’s the New Orleans favorite: the beignet — a small rectangular pillow of light crisp fried dough surmounted by a snowdrift of powdered sugar.
The beignet is served with chicory coffee and steamed milk. You have to train yourself not to inhale as you bite into a beignet lest you choke inhaling a tiny gust of powdered sugar going straight down your windpipe.