When I was growing up, doughnuts were the exception, not the rule. They were reserved for one very special time: the road trip. Each summer our family of four would pile into our ridiculously small car and head out across the country to visit an aunt or cousin or grandparent. Trips going west meant little boxes of sugared cereal eaten at a roadside Holiday Inn. But trips northward meant the best thing imaginable to my eight-year-old self: Dunkin’ Donuts.
My brother always ordered the chocolate dipped. I would stand on my tiptoes and carefully examine each flavor, imagining how the pastry would feel and taste as I took my first bite. Despite careful deliberation, I always decided between the same two flavors: the Chocolate Kreme Filled and the Dunkin’ Donut. The Dunkin’ Donut was about as simple as it gets: an old-fashioned cake doughnut with a hint of spice ingeniously shaped with a handle for dipping into a fresh cup of joe. I never actually dunked my doughnut, but I liked the little handle anyway. The Chocolate Kreme Filled was a fluffy raised doughnut filled with almost fluffier milk-chocolate frosting and coated with powdered sugar.
While I’ll always love those doughnuts, my tastes have also expanded. My husband, who hails from Hamilton, Ontario (the birthplace of Canada’s famous doughnut shop Tim Hortons), turned me on to the ethereal Honey Cruller. When I lived in Seattle, it was hard to avoid the temptations of Top Pot (Raspberry Glazed Chocolate Old Fashioned!) and Mighty-O (French Toast!), and all too easy to make a quick drive north of the city to Frost (Bourbon Caramel Pecan!). When we moved to Portland, we indulged in Voodoo Doughnut’s wonderfully crazy creations, like the Dirt, and Blue Star’s Crème Brûlée doughnut with a Cointreau injection. Now that we are living in DC, it’s all about Sugar Shack’s eclectic flavor of the moment, like the seasonal Harry Potter–themed Butterbeer doughnut (insider tip: Sugar Shack churns out new batches and flavors all day, so ask for whatever just came out), and Astro Doughnuts and Fried Chicken, where you can get a fried chicken sandwich with honey and hot sauce on an Old Bay doughnut. We even traveled to San Francisco to gorge on Dynamo Donut’s eclectic varieties and, of course, sampled the offerings at New York’s Doughnut Plant, and Peter Pan Donut and Pastry Shop.
Being surrounded by all those glorious pastries made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, I could make doughnuts at home. The notion of a fresh, warm doughnut pushed me past my initial deep-frying anxiety. How glad I am that it did! Making doughnuts is far simpler than I could have imagined, and my fear of hot oil was quickly banished. Before long I was dreaming up flavors for my own sinfully satisfying doughnuts, and was lucky enough to share the best of those recipes in the first edition of this book.
While a few years have passed, here I am, still fascinated with developing new techniques and flavors for homemade doughnuts, and still delighted to share them with you. In this second edition, you’ll find new doughs, glazes, toppings, and fillings to mix and match. So go ahead, treat yourself. You’ll be happy you did…and so will those around you!