Doughnut Festival at Shop the City

Top left: Caramel cookies from All Day Donuts
Top right: Australian Honey & Sea Salt from Shortstop
Bottom left: Mars Bar Brownie from Ahhh Donuts!
Bottom right: Vanilla slice donut from Candied Bakery

There was some Shop the City event on in the CBD today. A heap of stores were offering sales and one of the events they had there was a doughnut festival (Day of the Donut), which was held on the level 2 bridge between Melbourne Central and Emporium.

I mentioned this to A, and invited him to join me, but he opted out, saying he went last year and the line was insane. He was not wrong. It started at 5, and I got there at 4:50, and the line was already quite long.

(You can see the bridge way off in the distance. I estimate that I was probably around the 150th in line.)

TS and his girlfriend arrived a lot later, and said the line was even worse.

Once it hit 5pm, the stalls started opening, and the line began to move slowly. I was pretty glad I had brought my Kindle. I got to enter the doughnuts area at around 5:30, and was out of there by 5:45, so unlike the last doughnut festival we went to, this one had much better throughput. Once you enter, you are given a cardboard box to put your doughnuts in. Then you get to wander through all the stalls, skipping past any that you're not interested in. While you still had the problem of not being able to see the doughnuts until you reach the counter, I found this was much better than lining up for individual stalls and hoping that you want something by the time you get to the front.

Of course, if you go with someone else, you can hold the place in line while they check it out, but I didn't have that luxury. Fortunately, before it started, I quickly snapped photos of all the stalls before lining up, so I could check them out and decide beforehand. I decided to limit myself to 4 doughnuts: 2 for me and 2 for MrFodder, which I had planned to eat over two days, but MrFodder said we could split them both and each have half of all 4, and eating two doughnuts in a day isn't that bad. How can I argue with logic like that?

My favourite was the Mars bar brownie one, and MrFodder liked the vanilla slice one the best. I thought the honey salt one was interesting. My sweet tooth would have preferred just honey, but I still liked it. It had the texture of those Chinese doughnuts that you eat with congee, and I love those. The caramel cookie one was good, too. Why didn't I buy more doughnuts?!

For more photo spam, here are photos of all the stalls (oops, I got a photo of someone's ass at the Doughboys stall, which I won't post....):


Ascot Food Store:

Ahhh Donuts!:

Baker D Chirico:

Bistro Morgan:

Candied Bakery:

Uncle Donut:

All Day Donuts:

Cobb Lane:

(I don't remember the name of this place, but I think it's either Bake & Co or Donut Dessert tube)
I was pretty tempted to buy the apple crumble doughnut, but it came down to that or the Mars bar brownie one, and I thought MrFodder would like the Mars bar one more.

Shortstop:

I still resent the word "donut".