Carolyn Fath
The inside-out peanut butter and jelly doughnut.
The most puzzling aspect of Dough Baby, the new doughnut-centric bakery from former L’Etoile pastry chef Kristine Miller, may be its location. Once upon a time, State Street was the de facto place for quirky little storefronts. Do not count me among the number who bemoan what State Street has become, but there’s no question it has changed. Today, Dough Baby seems like a better fit for the much more hip Johnson Street.
But then I think back to my younger days, when I was an occasional visitor to Madison. Back when there was a flourishing bakery operation on State Street by the name of Ovens of Brittany, at one time staffed by L’Etoile founder Odessa Piper. (Kristine Miller’s husband is Tory Miller, current owner and chef at L’Etoile.) I think about how my family stopped at Ovens during visits, and I start to get a better handle on the Dough Baby storefront.
It’s not just the historical baking angle that makes Dough Baby a very Madison shop, or the local restaurant bona fides of its owner. Take one step through the doorway in its narrow storefront, and you see the tidy, spartan decor, the purposefully stocked bakery case — no heaving trays jam-packed full of angle-parked doughnuts sticking to each other. You see the slightly winking inclusion of organic juice boxes on the menu. This is Generation X-aged parents’ and millennial twentysomethings’ Madison.
I’m not a parent, but I am a Gen X-er, and one who sets his interstate travels by the nearest doughnut shops. Will Dough Baby be Madison’s Glazed and Infused? Its Strange? Its Voodoo Doughnuts? These shops (from Chicago, St. Louis and Portland, respectively) have a penchant for wild novelty and frequent recreational drug in-humor. That is not the Dough Baby way.
Dough Baby is more like Chicago’s Doughnut Vault, Minneapolis’ Bogart’s Doughnut Co. or St. Louis’ Vincent Van Doughnut. There is classic technique at work, with some flourishes that rely more on expected culinary combinations than pure goofball delirium.
Even so, the success of the doughnuts varies. The vibrant pink icing on the peanut butter and jelly doughnut (yeast, filled) draws you in. Then, rather than filling the interior with raspberry jelly, Dough Baby deploys a light but flavorful peanut butter creme. The fruit flavor is all on top, with a sprinkling of peanuts. The tart cherry almond (yeast, ring) performs similarly, with pleasantly tart icing but without the gooey filling.
The Cinnamon Toast Crunch (yeast, filled) has good cinnamon flavor in the icing, and the bits of cereal on top are always welcome, but there’s a kiddie pool’s volume of bland cinnamon cream inside. And pulverized chocolate cookies are too powdery to deliver any recognizable cookie flavor on the cookies and cream (yeast, ring).
However coconut cream pie (yeast, filled) will get you right with the world. It’s the perfect application of Dough Baby’s all-coconut-oil frying medium, subtly amplifying the layers of coconut from shaved topping to thin veneer of icing to the creme filling. Dough Baby’s creme technique is rustic, not perfectly smooth like industrial Bavarian cream, but instead slightly lumpy.
The lack of greasiness from the coconut oil deserves mention. A baggie of doughnut holes (the actual dough babies of the name) never betrays its contents’ fried nature. Many ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, eggs) are organic, and fruit is local and organic.
Apart from doughnuts, how about a bourbon pecan pie bar with rich eggy custard? A caramel brownie that resists the trend of salting every caramel everywhere, and also straddles the line to please devotees of both fudge and cake brownies? These narrow, rectangular bars are handy for grab-and-go eating.
Equally delicious items in the Dough Baby case are a couple of junk food standards. The oatmeal cookie sandwich has raisins, okay, fine, but the cream cheese frosting between two superbly sweet, buttery oatmeal cookies is rich and just ample enough.
And what I will go back to Dough Baby for, time and time again, are the pop-tarts. Except they’re really not pop-tarts. I’d never toast one. I’d never forget about one in a lunch bag. I’d never let so much as a crumb of these beauties fall to the floor under my desk at work.
Whether the filling of these little hand pies is Door County cherry, apricot and honey or some other fresh fruit, they’re winners. They’re definitely trendy, but Dough Baby makes them more than just a perfunctory ironic reference. They’re just good.
Dough Baby
511 State St.; 608-630-9030; doughbaby-bakery.com
8 am-3 pm Wed.-Sat., 9 am-3 pm Sun. (or until sold out); $1-$5
