Found! The Best Maple Donut (East Of The Rockies)

Another food obsession from the West Coast Homeland: maple-frosted donuts. These suntanned beauties turn simple fried dough into a complex confection. High quality maple icing isn’t just sweet but also perfumed and pungent. Not ordinary at all. I’ve been hunting for a good maple bar for years. (Also known as a Long John, a large rectangle of raised dough is the standard vehicle for maple frosting.) For the most part, I’ve found that donut vendors don’t know what I’m talking about. Once, I saw a bin labeled “maple” at a local Dunkin’ Donuts only to discover they had mis-labeled “marble” donuts. Yetch. A few weeks ago, I found some maple-frosted raised donuts at the Dunkin’ Donuts on 14th St. NW. I was glad they knew to use raised dough, but the icing had no magic, it was sweet and chemically.

I had pretty much given up hope (maple bars don’t fair well in the mail) when, finally, yesterday, I convinced my boyfriend to get out of bed early just to get breakfast at the Heidelberg Pastry Shoppe in Arlington. Lo and behold: maple-frosted donuts. I bought one with walnut crumbles on top. It was a little pillow of perfection. It’s not a bacon maple bar, but we’re getting there. The bakery also sells tubes of grainy mustard and really good hard rolls, more culinary objects of obsession.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Food & Drink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.