Let me just begin by saying – doughnuts, not donuts. I won’t give in to the butcherised American way of spelling it, thank you very much. (Edit from Jun in 2021: My stance on this has loosened significantly haha, and I now accept, and even do use the spelling ‘donut’. *cue audible gasps*)

To be fair, I don’t even know for sure if ‘donut’ IS an American spelling of the word, but for a country that turned ‘colour’ into ‘color’, ‘aluminium’ into ‘aluminum’, aubergine into eggplant, and worst of all – pronounces the word niche as ‘nitch’ (where is the ‘T’!?), the US sure makes for a pretty convincing candidate. Only kidding, I actually love America, despite its guns, Trumps, and idiosyncrasies. ❤️

Like any self-respecting geek though, to find out if the spelling ‘donut’ is really a product of American culture, I did some hardcore research. (Really it was just one Google search that spiraled into an hour-long dive into the annals of doughnut history. No doughnut-shape-driven rectal jokes please.)

Well, my suspicions were confirmed! Turns out the US was responsible for swapping out the name of the Dutch dish of olykoek – largely thought to be doughnut’s predecessor – to the more direct, but a lot less fun to say ‘doughnut’, as the shape of the doughy pastry resembled a nut (as in nuts and bolts). Then sometime in the early 1900s, they shortened ‘doughnut’ into ‘donut’, apparently for economic and linguistic reasons – the shorter spelling saved on neon signage costs, and was easier for non-English-speaking visitors to pronounce too.

Now I gotta admit, the reasoning for the simplified ‘donut’ spelling is a pretty sensible one. If it weren’t for my British education and the vestiges of Malaysia’s colonial past possibly at work, I’ll probably have adopted the simplified spelling years ago. I mean, it is admittedly a lot catchier, I’ll give it that. But for now, I’m still very much a doughnut-over-donut kinda guy. I’m also really tickled by the idea that the original spelling of ‘doughnut’ is just a typically snobbish, British response to the Americanised spelling – putting an ‘ugh’ in ‘donut’. Get it? 😛

Whichever camp you belong in though, I think we can all agree that doughnuts are the bomb! Very few pastry items can take on any flavour you throw in it and still taste great! Case in point – these lotus paste and salted egg yolks doughnuts, which are as far away from a traditional flavour as you can go.

Now you might be wondering, why lotus paste and salted egg? Well, with Mid-Autumn Festival having just passed, and the glut of mooncake posts flooding Instagram, let’s just say I was probably subliminally compelled to make a dish out of the classic mooncake flavours of… you guessed it, lotus paste and salted egg yolks!

And my god does it work! With the help of a solid doughnut recipe, and by adding some cream to lighten the usually thick and gummy lotus paste, it makes for a sultry combination of yeasty, airy fried dough and nutty, comforting filling, which I’m pretty proud to say, is unlike anything you can get at Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts. Plus, nowadays putting salted egg yolk on things seem to make it an instant hit, so you can’t possibly go wrong there!

These were so good that I’m willing to make the blasphemous admission that despite how much I love mooncakes (double yolk all the way), I’d pick these doughnuts over mooncakes any day! (Well maybe except for the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival; gotta tone down the heresy a bit before my parents disown me eh.)