Happy Birthday with a Donut

Today's my birthday.  I'm now double 7!  (Remember 77 Sunset Strip?)  Special birthday since I love the number seven, the date of my birth, August 7, 1945.

I usually like to celebrate with a piece of chocolate cake.  However, this year, let's do a little something different:  a chocolate donut.

I'm doing this because donuts are very new to Brazil.  Slowly, American culture is invading Brazil.  Brownies, muffins, cupcakes, bagels, peanut butter...and now donuts, pronounced as in dunuts.

As Ward Bond said in a scene from The Searchers, "sure fond of them donuts."  Me, too.  But, for health reasons, I currently rarely eat them.

And what is a donut?  It is a food deep fried with flour dough.  It comes in a ring shape or injected with fillings.  And they are sweet.  Sweet is good!  

When I was growing up in Oswego, we had a different kind of donut, called a Spudnut where all or most of the flour is replaced by either mashed potatoes or potato starch.  Incredibly, the taste was virtually the same as a donut.

In New York City, I discovered the most popular donut is from the chain, Dunkin' Donuts.  Historically, a donut was dunked into a cup of coffee.  The company was founded by Bill Rosenberg in Quincy, MA in 1950.  It currently has approximately 12,900 locations in 42 countries.

In supermarkets in New York, you can buy donuts in a box made by Entenmann's Company.  It was founded by William Entenmann in Brooklyn, NY in 1898.  They are available in various supermarkets throughout the USA.  I found them last year in St. Augustine, FL.

When I moved to North Carolina in 2007, I discovered Krispy Kreme donuts.  It was founded by Vernon Rudolph in what is now Winston-Salem, NC in 1937.  It has 1,400 shops worldwide.  They used to have one on East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill near my office.  I would stop there every morning.

I'm going to get my birthday donut at Pop Donuts which opened a few months ago at Rua Dr. Virgilio de Carvalho Pinto, 185, a few blocks from our home in Sao Paulo.  I sampled one soon after it opened and was very pleased with its quality.  

Happy birthday to me.