Any doughnut lover worth her salt is aware of Mad Over Donuts. The 11-year-old dessert chain, with over 60 outlets in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Bengaluru, made its Chennai début earlier this month, and of course we showed up for some sampling.
True to the brand’s pan-India model, its counter at VR Chennai sits beside a large kitchen, which in turn operates behind a see-through glass wall, giving shoppers and movie-goers a full view of its operations. Unsurprisingly, many slow down to watch the doughnuts being puffed up, fried, dunked in chocolate, stuffed with ganache and decorated with icing. And many among them decide to buy.
There are some Christmas specials on offer, so the first one we try is the plum cake donut, a chocolate base with honey milk chocolate filling and sugar dusted atop like snow. Plum cake fans would approve of this, considering that it is used liberally in the garnish. But it is far too dense to qualify as soft, and only those with a massive sweet tooth would enjoy it. If you are not one of them, better give this one a miss, for its green buttercream icing doesn’t do it any favours either. The snowman, another Christmas special, has a cream cheese icing and strawberry jam filling (and wears a pink scarf to boot). The doughnut sinks as you bite into it — there is a good chance that some sugar dust will scatter all over you at first bite. The jam filling is tasty enough, but doesn’t really ooze out the way you expect a MOD doughnut to.
- Food Court, VR Chennai, Anna Nagar
- Hits: Original glazed, dark temptation éclair
- Misses: Plum cake donut, frappuccino
- 66716254
Next, we opt for a classic. The original glazed golden brown outside and yellow on the inside. It isn’t the softest doughnut we have had, but is soft enough — and with the glaze as richly visible below as it is on the sugar-crunched top, this is clearly one of the best of the lot.
The éclair is the softest of all. Split in two, its top half is dipped in dark chocolate with a generous mound of both dark chocolate and milk chocolate icings both atop and in the middle. The icing has a bit of a crunch to it, and the base is soft despite having been sitting for long. We shamelessly take in all the layers in one big bite, and it’s totally worth it. This is straight up fun to eat, which is what desserts should be.
Doughnuts and coffee are a classic combination, but the frappuccino here looks like a quart of milk and tastes the same. Bereft of even a tinge of brown, it has a slight scent of coffee. That it is not sickly sweet, despite its vanilla-milkshake-like looks, is its only saving grace.
