The ongoing side-quest in this exploration has been Marianne’s attempt to get a blueberry doughnut. Many places serve them, but they are all gone by the time we arrive on the scene. Today, another potential blueberry doughnut provider came up on the list. What happened next restored my faith in cake doughnuts.
Whoo’s Donuts is a roadside doughnut shop. It is in Santa Fe, which is an arty capital city with a lot of cute-looking boxy clay buildings in it. Whoo’s fits right in – it has a definite Northern New Mexico personality. It’s covered in art. The tables are repurposed barrels. The doughnuts are made out of corn.
Well, some of them are. These particular doughnuts were the ones which we were rushing out the door to get ahold of, after an early morning ballooning over Albuquerque. Can you really make a good doughnut out of blue corn? I’ll admit, they look sort of like oat bran. But most reviews of Whoo’s that mention a doughnut point to the Blue Corn Blueberry Lavender.
They are magically delicious. They smell wonderful. The cake part is robust and a bit savory, and it perfectly matches the very sweet icing. As you might imagine, a corn doughnut is grainier and has a different taste than a wheat flour doughnut -much as cornbread compares to wheat breads. It is Marianne’s new favorite doughnut. And although I shot my mouth off about my feelings towards cake doughnuts yesterday, it may be mine too.
Whoo’s doughnut selection is priced into 3 levels of seriousness, which I will call Casual, Serious, and Overload. Casual doughnuts are common ring doughnuts, regular bars – the recipes you might find at Safeway or Winchell’s. Serious doughnuts are common filled doughnuts and ring doughnuts that are something special. All the blue corn ones are on this tier. Overload doughnuts are everything fancier than that – ones with special frostings, toppings, and pieces of chocolate from the chocolate shop next door – which is parent to this doughnut place.
We got a couple of overloaded doughnuts as well – they are more like small bundt cakes than handheld breakfast foods. The chocolate is crisp and exotic-tasting. I know, “exotic” isn’t a flavor, but I’m not sure how else to describe the quality of single-origin bean chocolate bars where they have a distinct flavor profile that my palate is not refined enough to geolocate.
There was only one person staffing the counter when we were there, and he was largely occupied with baking duties, though friendly and helpful when we engaged him. It was high noon on Wednesday, and we were the only people in the place – it made it seem like we had all the time in the world. But, according to reviews, they sell out quickly during high traffic times. Scheme accordingly.
