SUGAR RUSH

Portland Bakeries Give You 6 Reasons to Eat Dessert for Breakfast

With texture and finesse, local bakers make a definitive case for devouring dessert before 10 a.m.

By Karen Brooks February 11, 2015 Published in the February 2015 issue of Portland Monthly

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Prefer mini-doughnuts? Get thee to Pip’s Original!

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 

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.

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. 

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. 

 

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. 


Bonus Croissant
Hot, shatteringly good chocolate croissants—baked on the hour until 2 p.m.—at Mac Bar, Nuvrei’s underground disco macaron hideaway. 
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