Kara & Michael’s Blog

I consider myself a bit of a donut (doughnut) connoisseur. Maybe because I am so fat, maybe because I connect donuts to the era of my childhood where family and relatives would stop by or we would go to see them with donuts from local bakeries. No Dunkin Donuts for us, and Krispy Kreme hadn’t yet spread to suburban DC. We rocked the local donut places, I don’t remember all the names, but I could tell you how to get to all those places. even still. Unfortunately, most of them don’t exist, any more.

My childhood is full of random trips to bakeries or hostess stores. It is nigh on impossible to find a good old fashioned hostess store in this area, anymore. In fact, on my cross-country trip with WoDM, we stopped at a hostess store in Muskogee, Oklahoma – the first one I had seen in years. We bought a few things (raspberry zingers pretty much carried me through the drive to Colorado) but it was more about the experience.

My dad was usually the one to initiate trips to the bakery or hostess store. If you were up relatively early on a Saturday morning, he might ask you to accompany him. The hostess store we always visited was in Rockville, in a sort of industrial area, and Rockville was my parents’ old stomping ground.

I remember the trips being filled with stories, sunshine, and oh, the occasional fight with my younger sister resulting in my father’s wrath. But once we entered the store, and the smell of heavily processed baked goods snuck into our brains through the nostrils, all of that was done with. The store was dirty, disorganized and piled with crap, and we would usually leave with a cart full of pies, doughnuts and wonder bread. My father would mete out the pies over the next few days and make us turkey or tuna salad sandwiches on wonder bread.

This whole entry was brought on by my remembering Montgomery Donuts, today. It was a chain in Montgomery County, and they shut down while I was in high school. I guess they were hemorrhaging money pretty badly, Krispy Kreme had opened up that year, and the roof of their supply place collapsed under snow one winter. Truly tragic. I never really liked them much as a kid but I can remember the way they tasted, the way the shop smelled and I remember their cake doughnuts being amazing. You hardly get cake doughnuts anymore unless they’re chocolate cake, and they’re usually not great. But they had great cake doughnuts, nice crumb to them.

Of all the bakeries I’ve visited, they remind me most of my childhood. As locations they had started closing, my mom would buy doughnuts at Safeway or Giant, or we would visit relatives in Frederick and get doughnuts up there or in Jefferson. It was less of a special family trip, I was at an age where I didn’t spend loads of time with my parents and didn’t really want to.

That’s not to say I’ve outgrown my love of doughnuts At Montgomery college, I frequented a 24-hour Krispy Kreme with friends after concerts, or just to watch them make the doughnuts during the day. While I was dieting pretty severely at UMBC, I allowed myself one chocolate glazed donut every Sunday morning for breakfast. Every time I go to the store (Shoppers, out here), I stare at the doughnuts. They’re massive and tasty, better than most doughnut chains, but it’s not like I have tons of money and calories to piss away on doughnuts. I wish I did. I don’t remember being much more excited as a kid than I was with a cart full of hostess goodies. This probably explains a large portion of my unhealthy diet.

K.