Portland Bakeries Give You 6 Reasons to Eat Dessert for Breakfast
Image: Stuart Mullenberg
Prefer mini-doughnuts? Get thee to Pip’s Original!
Image: Stuart Mullenberg
Blue Star Donuts
Hard Apple Cider Fritter
If there’s a better hunk of fried dough anywhere, bring it on. With bright cider shrieks and craggy ravines crosshatching the top, trapping extravagant bits of char and chew, Blue Star’s specimen defies the laws of fritterdom. Rip in to find rum-soaked raisins and apple shards, their juices pooling with apple pie gusto into a soft field of yeasty brioche. It’s big enough to share ... but why?
The Sugar Cube (Now Closed)
Salted Caramel Cinna-Bunz
Image: Stuart Mullenberg
Here lies everything you were denied in a strip-mall cinnamon roll:
- A beehive of fluffy dough
- Cream cheese frosting euphorically smeared on top, every inch high on vanilla beans, orange zings, and toasty brown butter
- Salted caramel sauce, the best you can imagine, spiraled all over
Ask baker supreme Kir Jensen to serve it warm, so everything oozes in marvelous ways. Wicked. Available only Fri–Sun.
Image: Stuart Mullenberg
Little T Baker
Cream Cheese Brioche
How can nothing more than a crater of sweet-tangy cream cheese baked into a wad of accomplished brioche dough be this good? You could easily eat one a day, just like vitamins.
Image: Stuart Mullenberg
Oui Presse
Hazelnut Espresso Coffee Cake
One tall, burly wedge of super-moist, espresso-soaked sour-cream coffee cake + one topping of batter scraps, brown sugar, and whole hazelnuts baked into a rocky vista of toffee crunch = morning glory.
Image: Stuart Mullenberg
Bakeshop
Almond Croissant
We’d prance over hot coals to nab the last of these masterpieces, less almond croissants than all-out textural earthquakes. After their trip to the oven, pastry ace Kim Boyce splays open her baked, butter-flaky pastries for a secret brushing with vanilla syrup and orange flower water. The reassembled tops are then mortared in thick nut paste, snowy sugar, and roughly 1,000 slivered almonds. What emerges from a second oven ride? A Star Wars–level force field of crunch and flake oozing near-custardy almond cream.
