Doughnuts in my life

Madeleines, madeleines, eh... what kind of rubbish, lightweight cake is that to base an important literary conceit around? What's wrong with doughnuts?

When I think of doughnuts, I think especially of Edinburgh and the so-called "Belgian breakfasts" which I used to enjoy with friends, which consisted of a Belgian bun, a fudge-custard doughnut and a can of Coke. There are few meals I've eaten with regularity that I look back on with more fondness and which are more expressive of life lived for pleasure without worrying about the consequences (deep-fried haggis, chips, sauce, Coke and a Mars Bar for pudding is another classic of that era).

The past few years have been interesting ones on the UK doughnut scene, because what was once a fairly homogenous market has now stratified in a pretty extreme fashion. At one end, there are the pricey American interlopers, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin Donuts, and at the other, supermarket special offers of eight or ten or twelve doughnuts for about a quid. And in the middle are the bakers, in particular Gregg's, which has expanded south from its northern heartlands, to offer what I'd consider to be the classic roster of UK doughnuts. Quite why doughnuts should have become such a key signifier in retail battles and why there should be these massive differentials in terms of price and perception was slightly baffling to me, so I decided to organise a "blind doughnut tasting" so as be able to stuff my face in a socially acceptable fashion, er, I mean, to parse apart the complexities of this doughnut conundrum.

For various reasons, the tasting was not quite as scientific a process as I had imagined in my daydreaming at work, not least because I wasn't able to get hold of any fudge doughnuts from Gregg's (note to execs: please open your Leather Lane branch on Saturdays - you will be well rewarded by me for doing so). In the end, there was more or less a straight battle between Tesco's and a few other supermarket doughnuts, in the one camp, and a dozen Krispy Kreme, on the other. Frankly I think that Gregg's, or Crawford's in Scotland, would have put up a much better fight than the supermarkets, because KK creamed them in a pretty serious fashion. The accompanying picture of a plate of doughnuts was decimated much more on the KK end than the Tesco's side, and the grand individual winner was KK's 'glazed chocolate cake'. This is a doughnut with very impressive qualities, we all agreed: a pleasing heaviness, textural contrast between crispiness and cakey softness, deep chocolate, and the retention of a certain pleasing greasiness which is essential in even the poshest doughnut.