City Hall Farmers' Market Apple Cider Donut

Location: City Hall Farmers' Market, Chambers and Broadway, Orchards of Concklin booth

Schedule: Every Friday morning until December 19; click here for other Orchards of Concklin locations

My order: Bag of 6 donuts, 10 oz. bottle of apple cider

Cost: $3.25

This one was a big shrug. I'd heard very good things about the Orchards of Concklin's donuts, so I arrived at the corner of Chambers and Broadway this morning with unrealistically high expectations. I was hoping to see a sunny, bustling market full of ruddy, apple-cheeked folk snapping open paper bags beside table after table groaning under the weight of photogenic produce. And I was sure the apple cider donuts were going to be fried on the spot in a rustic kettle by a round, jovial man in bib overalls with a wise twinkle in his eye.

Not to be.

The market consisted of five flimsy tents huddled together at the corner of Chambers and Broadway in near-freezing weather. The canvas flaps shivered in the wind. The jovial farmers and consumers full of innocence and wonder were not to be found. Instead, a few commuters wrapped in scarves hurriedly picked out apples, saran-wrapped danishes, and kosher honey while very stoic hourly workers stood by the cash registers and blew into their freezing hands.

The donuts were just OK. They were not made on the spot, but instead sold on a shelf in plastic bags. Six donuts for $2.25 is a real bargain, though, and the dusting of cinnamon (and possibly a bit of brown sugar) was expertly applied -- not too much and not too little. Because of the chilly temperature -- and also because of the time lag between the donut's birth and my consumption of it -- the donut cake did not have quite enough give. The apple cider was refreshing and sweet, with a very straightforward taste. It was more like very good apple juice than very good cider. You couldn't taste the land.

I met up with a friend on her way to work and we retreated to a nearby Starbucks for a coffee. The plan was to give the apple cider donuts another try in a heated environment. But our hearts just weren't in it. In the end, my friend took the four leftover donuts to her office for her colleagues to scavenge. That's not much of a tribute.

I'm afraid I really dropped the ball on farmers' market donuts this season. It's just too cold to enjoy them properly and a lot of markets are shutting down now. Maybe next year?

Because We Love Online Quizzes

Today's cool thing is Typealyzer, a tool that generates psychological profiles of bloggers. All you do is enter the blog's URL and the typealyzer algorithm spits out a description of its author.

According to Typealyzer, my profile is "ESFP," also known as "The Performer."

"The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

"They enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions."

Well, I don't know about the soft fabrics and bright colors. Also, the illustration of "The Entertainer" is not quite accurate. I never wear knee-high boots. But, I have to agree that NYC Donut Report!! is certainly all about pleasure and beauty and sweet smells.

What Donut Are You?

Finally! A psychological test that correlates personality types with donut types. I dare you to take the quiz! Click here!

According to the quiz, I am a Boston creme:

You have a tough exterior. No one wants to mess with you.
But on the inside, you're a total pushover and completely soft.
You're a traditionalist, and you don't change easily.
You're likely to eat the same doughnut every morning, and pout if it's sold out.

Although I would not put Boston creme in my top tier of donuts, the psychological profile is not far off, especially the part about pouting.

By the way, now that we know John McCain prefers sprinkles, I tinkered around with the quiz until I found this profile for the "sprinkled donut" personality type. I'm not sure this totally matches the image I had of McCain. What do you guys think?

Flamboyant and flashy, you're easily distracted by shiny things.
You're definitely a snazzy number, and you usually catch everyone's eye in the room.
And you've got the goods to back up your colorful image.
(Though too much of you gives people a stomachache!)

What kind of donut are you? Feel free to share your results in the comments.

Breaking: Furbys Are Real!!

As longtime readers know, here at NYC Donut Report!! we're committed to bringing articles of interest to your attention because good reading -- ideally a nice, smudgy article in a physical newspaper -- is an essential component of the donut lifestyle.

Well, to that end, unless you've been living under a rock you may have noticed that the Internet has been blowing up the last 24 hours over the discovery that Furbys are real and live deep in the forests of Indonesia.

Furbies, those annoying furry robots that were all the rage in the late nineties, are back. But this time they’re alive. In the past few months, scientists have captured three live Furby lookalikes—called pygmy tarsiers (Tarsius pumilus)—in Indonesian forests. Pygmy tarsiers are tiny nocturnal primates, less than four inches long, with giant eyes and long thin fingers tipped with claws.

Until now, the gremlin-like creatures were almost mystical. The last time a pygmy tarsier was found alive was in 1930. Many scientists were convinced that the species was extinct until Indonesian scientists found one dead in a mouse trap in 2000. Determined to track down the mysterious species, a team of primatologists set up 276 mist nets in the mountains of Indonesia. They captured three, two males and one female, and fitted them with radio collars.

The forests in Indonesia and other places are full of creatures that few have ever seen, and I hope people will keep that in mind and preserve places like this.

I was going to make a crack about how we thought the toy Furby was real and the animal was extinct but it turned out to be the other way around. But no! In fact, man-made Furbys are still going strong. There is a new generation of Furbys whose owners

seek to integrate aspects of the Furby experience into human society. The most visible of these groups include Furbish-to-English translators. . .

And apparently there are sick people roaming free on the streets called "circuit benders" who like to hack into Furbys and mess with their brains. There are tons of videos showing this. But I have to warn you that if you have any emotional connection to the Furby at all -- and you probably do, whether you realize it or not -- these videos will literally sicken you. Think twice before clicking.

Until the next NYC Donut Report!!

Courage!!

Zeitgeist Watch!!

Original Donut Homie Wendy alerted me to this important cultural shift. It happened on TV, so it's not just real. It's more real than real!!

because i know sometimes it's hard to find tidbits for your blog...

in this episode of 30 rock, alec baldwin makes an important donut pronouncement at about 1 minute 43 seconds in...

http://www.hulu.com/watch/44306/30-rock-the-one-with-the-cast-from-night-court

that's all!

Here's the precise moment she's talking about:



For those of you forbidden to stream video, Alec Baldwin says:

We're using credit cards in cabs now, all the galleries have moved to Chelsea, and we're off cupcakes and we're back to donuts.

Change is coming, people!!
.

Who Makes NYC's Best Apple Cider Donut??

(Photo swiped from Flickr user asacco9642)

I am now accepting nominations for NYC's best apple cider donut. If you know of a good one, please make your pitch for it in the comments.

Although you are free to name a mass-produced apple cider donut if you've had a really good one, I'm really more interested in the ones you can get at farmers' markets. I've heard good things about the donuts at the Lincoln Center market and the ones by Orchards of Concklin. Less good things have been said about the apple cider donuts at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

Agree? Disagree? Others? Make your voice heard!!

Enrico's Pastry Shop & Café, Morris Park Ave. between Hone and Lurting Aves., the Bronx

Location: 1057 Morris Park Avenue

Subway: 5 to Morris Park, followed by a 10 minute walk (see map). Getting here is not easy and getting back is even harder; more on this below.

Neighborhood: Morris Park, a working-class neighborhood whose residents are apparently required by law to pave over their small, cramped lawns with concrete, ring them with menacing iron gates, and then festoon the property with plastic ghosts and jack-o'-lanterns, cardboard turkeys, inflatable snowmen, Irish and Italian flags, plastic garlands of ersatz fall leaves, soiled whimsical scarecrows, horse-and-buggy plaques, Hannah Montana posters, fake roses, and "Beware of Dog" signs.

My order: Chocolate-frosted cruller, black-and-white custard-filled donut, plain glazed, small coffee.

Cost: $3.85

I have to confess. Until today, I had never intentionally set foot in the Bronx, although I did end up there once by accident, in 1998, after falling asleep on the 2 train. And that is a shame because the Bronx is so central to American history and culture. Hip-hop was invented there. The "Bronx cheer" was born there. The Archie comic books were set there, in Riverdale. Babe Ruth caroused with prostitutes there and hit home runs there that he'd promised to gravely ill children. And whatever the Grand Concourse is -- and whatever it is that people do there -- all that, too, is there.

What was I thinking? I mean, people! Did you realize Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Annabel Lee" while living out the last years of his tragic, penniless life in the Bronx?

Anyway, today I atoned. Thanks to the MTA's jumbled weekend service, I had to take three different trains to get to the Morris Park station, but I managed. And after a brisk walk past innumerable tin awnings and Catholic grade schools, I found myself at Enrico's, a shop that offers not only donuts but also Italian cakes and pastries, elaborate cookies and tarts, a forlorn-looking pyramid of cupcakes studded with M&M's, and many many cannolis.

Enrico's is staffed by a gaggle of cheerfully insolent teenage girls who seem only intermittently aware that they are working at a place of business. My coffee order temporarily vanished into an ether of giggles and conspiratorial whispers. When I asked for extra napkins, the ringleader of the girls -- apparently known to the regular customers as "the cheerleader" -- tried to charge me a penny a napkin.

"You're kidding," I said.

"Don't mess with the cheerleader," cackled a weatherbeaten man in his late 40s who leaned against a wall in the corner, sipping from a paper cup and eyeing the girls closely.

Later, another customer came in -- also a crinkled white man in late middle age -- and engaged the girls in some mildly creepy sass. "Who's your favorite customer?" he asked them. "C'mon, aren't I your favorite customer?"

"You're all our favorite customers," replied the napkin gouger. "Well, except some of you aren't."

"Do not mess with the cheerleader," repeated the man in the corner.

However, I should also say that the girls let me use their bathroom in the back. Enrico's gets many bonus points for that. And after I used the bathroom I took a peek at the surprisingly large baking and frying operation going on in the back room where men in white aprons and white paper hats toiled in a cloud of flour. It's a nearly 24-hour operation back there, I was told.

As for the donuts, they are pretty good. If you can only eat one donut from Enrico's, it absolutely has to be their custard filled. I don't know why more people don't fill their donuts with custard. The weight and texture of the vanilla custard filling went very well with the light, fresh donut surrounding it. On the other hand, the black and white frosting was probably excessive. It was no different than cake frosting, which is great for a cake but not so great for a light, pillowy donut.



Sadly, Enrico's committed the same sin with the frosted cruller pictured at the top of this post. Crullers are all about lightness and airiness. In fact, the sign of a truly great cruller is that, when you bite into it, it somehow seems lighter than is physically possible. Whether the crullers at Enrico's meet that standard is impossible to know because they are loaded down with cake frosting. It truly is a sin, a senseless act of transgression and destruction, like dipping cotton candy in nacho cheese.

After that sour note, I was relieved to enjoy a very good, very light, very fresh plain glazed. It was the perfect finish after the heaviness of the earlier donuts.



And with that, the visit was over, and I was back on the Morris Park platform. The 5 train back to Manhattan was nowhere to be found. A handful of glum people sat on benches with their chins in their hands, as though they'd been there for a long time. It was only one o'clock in the afternoon but the station was crepuscular and desolate, as if trying to warn us that the wait would not be short.



Eventually a train approached, but passed without stopping. Then the garbage train inched by. If you've never waited on a NYC platform when that yellow and black garbage train painstakingly grinds and wheezes along the track -- which means that the next passenger train will not be arriving for a very long time -- you have never experienced true hopelessness.

At this point, an elderly woman in wraparound sunglasses began dragging a nylon plaid laundry bag up and down the platform, ranting to no one in particular about the poor subway service. "This is the most disgusting train I've ever had to ride," she said. "What a horrible line! I used to live in Parkchester, that was much better. Horrible!"

When this failed to get a response from anyone, she stomped down the platform, squinting at each passenger one by one. "Look at you all!" she said. "You just sit there! Don't say a word! Don't complain! You sons a' bitches."

She scraped her nylon bag over the concrete. "Well, guess what?" she said. "I'm going to City Hall tomorrow. I'm going to complain! Straight to the mayor!"

Another 5 train, an express train, zoomed past the platform without stopping. The old woman frowned.

"But he's a shithead, too," she said, "that Bloomberg."

Eventually a local 5 train did stop, and we all got on silently. I can't remember where the old woman got off. It was a long journey to the Bronx, but I'm still glad I made it, and I hope it's not my last visit there.

And finally, if you're thinking of making the trip up to Morris Park, you should also check out this report from Cakespy. (Thanks also to Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake for mentioning this to me.)