How My Donut Taste Evolved: From Sugar-Explosion to Simple Perfection

🍩 The Simplicity of Donuts (and Getting Older)

There was a time when I wouldn’t even look twice at a plain donut. As a kid, I wanted the biggest, gooiest, most sugar-packed donut in the case, the custard-filled, chocolate-iced Long John. If there was jelly or filling oozing out, even better. I wanted that sugar rush that made Saturday mornings feel like a party.

A chocolate-iced donut with sprinkles? That was “plain Jane” to me. I’d only grab one of those if the case was picked over and the good stuff was gone. I wanted bang for my buck — flavor explosions, sticky fingers, frosting under my nails, and that feeling like I’d just pulled off the best trade in the school cafeteria.

But time has a funny way of changing not just our tastes, but how we taste.

These days, simpler is better. Ask me what my go-to donut is with a morning coffee, and I’ll tell you without hesitation, it’s probably a sour cream cake donut or a plain glazed cake donut. You know the kind: shiny, rustic-looking, a little jagged around the edges, like something Grandma might’ve fried up on an old cast iron skillet when you were a kid.

My go-to these days
An Old Fashioned Cake Donut

There’s something about that crumbly, slightly crisp exterior giving way to the soft inside that just hits right. It’s humble. It’s honest. It doesn’t need a fancy filling or a drizzle of anything. Just a donut, pure and simple, doing what a donut does best, keeping coffee company.

Now, don’t get me wrong, a Krispy Kreme Original Glazed, fresh off the line, still warm and melting in your mouth, is a whole different story. I could down four of those before my coffee even cools off. (Which is exactly why I do my best to avoid driving past the place, for fear of seeing the “Hot Donuts Now” sign lit up. There’s just no winning that battle.)

Somewhere along the line, my sweet tooth didn’t exactly fade, it just got wiser. I started slowing down, actually tasting what I was eating instead of just chasing the next sugar high. Maybe that’s part of getting older.. realizing that the joy isn’t in how much flavor you can cram into one bite, but in how much appreciation you can get out of something simple done right.

So yeah, give me the plain old-fashioned cake donut with a cup of hot coffee any day. The kind that reminds you of early mornings and simpler times, when a donut was just a donut, not a photo op.

What about you? Has your favorite donut changed over the years, or do you still go straight for the filled, frosted, and sprinkled kind?

Before Therapy, There Was Donuts

Before I ever heard the phrase “inner child,” I was already comforting mine—with donuts.

Before therapy, there were donuts.

Not the trendy, over-the-top Instagram creations stacked with cereal or drizzled in matcha. I’m talking about the kind behind foggy glass at a gas station counter, or sitting in a cardboard box on the passenger seat next to you. A cream-filled, chocolate-iced long john. An apple fritter the size of your hand. The kind you grabbed on the way to school, before a shift at work, or after church when the world still felt blurry and too big.

Long before anyone asked how I was really doing, I had a ritual. I would sit in my car, sip strong coffee, and quietly enjoy a donut as the sun came up countless times across the years. There was something sacred about it: the stillness, the sky slowly warming, the first bite of sugar and dough cutting through the noise of a long day ahead. I still do it sometimes, even now. Not out of habit, but reverence.

Some people heal on a couch. Some of us started healing at a counter.

And back then, counters mattered. Donut shops used to have real ones, long, low bars with round stools that swiveled. You’d sit down and have your donut served on a plate, your coffee poured into a ceramic mug. A waitress would come by to warm it up before it got cold. You weren’t in a rush. You were there. It wasn’t grab-and-go. It was sit-and-stay.

Donut shops made you pause. Just like the evening paper once did. Or a slow nightcap of cognac or brandy. Or a quiet pipe at the end of the day. All of it built to slow you down, to give you space to think, to be. Not scroll. Not hustle. Just breathe.

You don’t see shops like that much anymore. I haven’t in years. Most are big-box chains now. You walk in, grab your dozen, sip your coffee in a cardboard cup, and disappear into the traffic of life. But those old shops, the real ones, they were an experience. A point of connection. A ritual of relaxation, socializing, grounding.

This isn’t a love letter to sugar. It’s a nod to the little things that held us together before we even knew we were falling apart. Donuts were simple. Affordable. Kind. No questions asked. No forms to fill out. Just a little sweetness when the world was too much.

And honestly? Sometimes they still are.

Oct-23-2025.. I delve into the exact type of donuts that bring me so much joy and peace these days, in a new blog post entitled: 

How My Donut Taste Evolved: From Sugar-Explosion to Simple Perfection

Lockdown Day 28 - Hard work and thinking about Donuts

Things are getting back to normal after a couple days of feeling a bit down.  A nice dinner on the weekend, breaking back into reading, and trying not to focus on the negative has helped immensely however.  Here's what I did yesterday..

• Mowed, edged and trimmed the yard
• Performed weekly pool maintenance
• Wrote and worked on the blog and social media accounts

That's about it. I spent a few hours outside in the heat and humidity and it kind of wiped me out, so I relaxed inside the rest of the afternoon to recoup.  I have a short video to edit, and have plans of shooting another as soon as the clouds decide to finally go away.  

Curiously, readership of  Donut and snack cake content has been going through the roof this month on the blog, so I'm going to embrace that and do a new review this week.  I do believe I may even write some other donut or snack cake related content.

That's about it for now folks, thanks for stopping by.  Not sure what I'll be doing today, but will update you tomorrow and will try to post additional content in the meantime.  Cheers!