How to Eat Fried Dough

We returned from Oahu Monday morning.* Those looking for a travel log should look elsewhere. Here we deal with donuts.

The first sampling came from Napoleon's Bakery, which accompanies the Hawaiian restaurant chain Zippy's. We stopped by in the late afternoon to look over the dinner menu, though it was the bakery that intrigued me.**

What you're looking at, and what caught my eye, was this chocolate yeast raised donut. It was a new concept to me, and I had no reason to resist.

While a unique concept, the chocolate yeast raised donut proved to be unremarkable. The chocolate in the dough added very little to the donut beyond the color. still, I didn't lament the 93 cents it cost me to try it.

A few days later we stopped by Agnes' Portuguese Bakery in Kailua. Michelle raved about these malasadas:

I didn't. They have to be eaten warm to be tolerable. Michelle would talk of the crispy outside and the softy and chewy "delightfully warm" interior, with just the right amount of sugar. Perhaps too she was swayed by the notion that their Portguese donuts. Had they been called "Oversized Hush Puppies coated in sugar", she may better have seen them for what they were.

At any rate, I wasn't so easily fooled. Granted, as Michelle pointed out, all doughnuts are ultimately only a combination of fried dough and sugar. Not all donuts, however, compel such coarse reminders of that.

I, instead, spent my morning appetite on these bad boys:

I decided to tackle this enormous cinammon roll, as well as a macademia nut covered maple bar. Both were well dressed up, and undoubtedly would've tasted better if I felt like I could have afforded some milk to go along with them.*** Neither, however, left a lasting impression.

Lastly, while vacationing I ran across an article purporting to list "America's Best Donuts." I'm more than a little suspicious that most, if not all, of the donut shops made the list because they're famous or quirky -- not because they've got America's best donuts. However, one on the list, Randy's Donuts, was only a few blocks from where we parked in Los Angeles.

Groggy though we were from a miserable red-eye, we left a place in our schedule for Randy's. We bought several kinds. In fact, we had to buy $5.00 worth to be able to use the credit card.

The maple bar above was the best I've ever tasted: the frosting was perfectly sweet and the donut itself slightly crispy on the outside. I fear unless I return there again, I will never taste its equal.

The chocolate frosted cake donut above had semi-sweet chocolate frosting. I wasn't impressed, but then the maple bar had raised the stakes a bit. Michelle liked the buttermilk donut a lot too, but my tastebuds had been ruined by the time we got to that donut, so its subtleties were lost on me.

In all, a fine vacation, though I went far enough down that sugary path that we've resolved again to go without sugar...at least 'til Friday.

*First post in almost a month? Two words: Nintendo Wii.

** While there I observed a man wearing a U of U med school polo shirt. He seemed to have observed me too, and apparently wanted to confirm his suspicions I was LDS. His approach left something to be desired: he walked up to me and asked "Are you wearing two shirts because it's fashionable or because it's too cold out?" How would you have responded? I just started at him blankly for a few seconds before deciding to say flatly, "I'm not wearing two shirts."

***Our best efforts found a gallon of skim milk for $5 at Safeway.