Powdered Sugar Lemon Donut, Dunkin Donuts, Flemington, New Jersey

I have never been one to turn down a baked good. I will eat cake with my fingers. I will break cookies into halves, as if I am not going to return to finish the job minutes later. However, the donut is easily the item I desire most. Donuts are entirely ubiquitous with my existence—I am known for loving donuts. I post photos of boxes every Saturday morning on Instagram. I look up donut places in every town that I travel to and make it a centerpiece of the entire trip, my picture being taken outside of the bakery as I hold my precious dozen.

However, I eat donuts more weekends than I am traveling to new and fantastic places. Therefore, my quest for donuts is simplified: at my home in the Deep South I am deeply loyal to Dunkin Donuts over the regional favorite Krispy Kreme. There is a beauty in the simplicity of Dunkin: their basic interchangeable menu items, their bulbous orange and pink lettering. Dunkin reminds me of my father: it was a place that we would go together when I was a kid—the store was positioned on an awkward place on the Flemington Circle, which made getting in and out of the parking lot a treacherous feat. My mother, never the confident driver, would refuse to stop there for this reason, and so it made the place even more mysterious and forbidden. The one time my mother would make the trek was on Father's Day: she would risk the swirling traffic on Route 202 in her Pontiac Sunbird and I would get to pick the dozen, knowing full well that while it was a gift, I would get my hands on at least two of them. My father's favorite donut is the lemon filled, and it is mine as well. I could say something along the lines of that I chose lemon because I wanted to be like my dad, & perhaps that is true, but the real truth is that there is something about the combination of the sticky bright yellow gel with a deep fried pastry that requires it to be in every dozen or half-dozen box that gets taped up from here on forward.

When I moved to Alabama in 2005, I was significantly out of Dunkin Donuts range—I, of course, had matured to drinking coffee (or, at least, frozen drinks loaded with sugar with the taste of coffee), and so I missed Dunkin terribly. I'm never one to turn down any type of donut, but Krispy Kreme never scratched that itch for me, simply because I did not grow up with them—the consistency to me was always a bit more spun sugar than of substance. About seven years later, a Dunkin opened in Bessemer, about 45 miles away. Myself and fellow northeasterners would make pilgrimages to Dunkin Donuts, or, at the very least, make trips to Birmingham a bit more frequently knowing that we could stop on the way back.

My lament, however, is by this time, Dunkin Donuts had changed its lemon donut. In the past, it was coated with powdered sugar. Now, instead, it has a granulated sugar, which completely ruins my sense of nostalgia as well as mouth-feel. It is a shell of what it once was—an ersatz lemon replacement that leaves me chasing some concept of the past that I didn't know that I missed.

Dunkin Donuts is now ubiquitous—there is one about three miles away, refashioned out of an old Greyhound Bus Station. There is another even closer--two right hand turns and a left, and I am in the parking lot. I go there for coffee (iced, though with no sugar—I have grown, I have grown), and the occasional Boston Cream.

One can still find a lemon donut done properly: a perfectly fried yeast donut, a tart lemon goo, powdered sugar. When I find them, I express my gratitude to the person working the cashier, for doing things "the right way". I have no doubt that they are better than the lost Dunkin Donut lemon donut in every way, but their taste is amplified by the fact that it is a version of something that I once loved but cannot have again. In a sense, it is the same as it always has been—the donut of my youth is still inaccessible, even though I have gotten older and can buy my own donuts, navigate my own car through morning traffic.

On Saturday mornings when I am home in New Jersey, I drive to the Farmer's Market in my grandmother's Altima. I pick out a dozen donuts, stocking up on at least four lemon donuts for the family. On the way home, I drive past the Dunkin Donuts of my youth. I go through the drive through and order an iced latte, this time with caramel. The voice on the other end of the speaker asks if I would like anything else.