The dough­nut popup web page said Wed­nes­day! Leeds Street Bakery! Rhu­barb and cream! Salted car­a­mel and bacon! Chocol­ate and hazel­nut! This all soun­ded pretty prom­ising. So I circled the day on the cal­en­dar and wondered. Would the dough­nuts be iron­ic­ally Simpsonesque, or would they be inspired by Portland’s finest?

This morn­ing, hav­ing heard the popup was fairly pop­u­lar and queues would be involved, I arrived at around 7:55am. I wanted to make sure I could get enough to share. Yes, the queue was real and it only got longer. But about 40 minutes later I had a big paper bag full of warm fried dough and was mak­ing my way back to work in the Sta­tion end of town.

Pictures from the Doughnut popup The dough­nuts: for me, were some­thing of an anti-cli­max (not helped by being giv­en one less dough­nut than I paid for). My over­blown expect­a­tions of what was going to be for sale were clearly not going to match the real­ity: a ball the size of a small fist with some sauce injec­ted into it.

But, that aside, the warm dough and slightly crisp sugared exter­i­or were deli­cious. I had the Salted Car­a­mel and Bacon ver­sion; and while I found this a bit bland (it was­n’t very salty and I could taste no bacon) the sauce and the dough­nut togeth­er provided a pleas­ing com­bin­a­tion of tex­tures.

My work­mates mean­while were very appre­ci­at­ive. Dough­nuts all dis­ap­peared in short order. Win! Day improved, just like that.

But next year, can we have a week­day popup closer to the bor­ing end of town? Ta.

The Dough­nut Popup is part of Wel­ling­ton on a Plate. It’s on Volun­teer Corner (Vic­tor­ia & Dix­on), week­day morn­ings until the 28th. Each day, a dif­fer­ent team make the dough­nuts, so my exper­i­ence may not be rep­res­ent­at­ive.