Chris Borrelli writes at the Chicago Tribune: Well, could ya?
Could you create the finest donut known to mankind – a monument to the art of the fried cake itself? Last year around this time, Dunkin Donuts posed this very question via a contest. If you could come up with an incredibly original donut, they would give you credit and let you name it and then they would sell it and give you some money for it. This year, not so incredibly, they have launched the 2nd Annual Create Dunkin’s Next Donut Contest. Entries will be accepted starting Feb. 8 and the winner will receive $12,000 and… whoa, whoa, whoa.
The trouble is, when you go to the Web site that Dunkin has created for this contest, the ingredients are limited to those that any Dunkin Donut shop could reasonably sell on a normal day. You are given a number of choices – warning, this process is so addicting, you will not get any work done for the next hour – and many options (glaze, stuffing, shape, etc.), but the options subject to what can be accomplished in an average donut shop, including the more than 475 Dunkin Donut shops that are in the Chicago area.
So, no bacon cruller or wood-roasted sunflower seed long john topped Vermont maple glaze.
I came up with a pumpkin cake ring coated in a French cruller glaze and topped with a Graham Cracker crust. I called it “Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” but it was woefully lacking. I felt constrained by THE MAN.
Last year’s winner was a guy named Jeff from Alabama who came up with a toffee-sour-cream cake.
You can do better Chicago. You gonna let Alabama tell you they know better when it comes to fried food? Go to the Dunkin web site and submit your masterpiece and let us know here what you came up with.
Better yet, give us a donut that those corporate donut guys wouldn’t dare trot out. An okra and kimchi stuffed round boy coated in a glaze of BBQ and sprinkled with fried M&M’s? Well, yes we can, Chicago.
