Holey doughnuts!

Christmastime is here again! How do I know, you ask? Because it's rainin' themed doughnuts!

As often -- way too often -- in the past I have undertaken to review Dunkin' Donuts seasonal offerings, a job that was complicated by the fact that the usual two seasonal choices were upped to three this year. But on advice of my doctor, I kept it to two, with snide remarks about the third. (Actually my doctor's advice would probably be "Eat kale," so we didn't discuss it.)

The three seasonal doughnuts for Christmas 2017 are: 

1) Gingerbread Cookie Donut

2) Snowflake Sprinkle Donut

3) Frosted Sugar Cookie Donut, or Donut Not Appearing in This Blog Post. 

So here's doughnuts 1 and 2:

Let's look at them in reverse order.

The Frosted Sugar Cookie was described in the literature as "a frosted donut with cookie dough flavored filling and topped with crumbled frosted sugar cookies"; this made me think of the pumpkin-shaped doughnut from 2014 that was actually too sweet for me. Considering that there are very few things in this world that are too sweet for me, this scared me off it.

But the Snowflake Sprinkle also disappointed in its way, because it was really just a frosted sprinkle doughnut. Sure, the sprinkles are shaped like snowflakes, but is it worth going out of your way for that? And while I hate to rat on my local Dunkin' Donuts shoppe, the press release describes this item as a "frosted donut with red icing and special snowflake sprinkles" -- you'll notice my doughnut had white icing. Problem in the back office? Hmm.

The most interesting one was the Gingerbread Cookie, which was okay but completely bizarre. Here's the thing: It looks like a doughnut with gingerbread cookie bits stuck in the icing, but that's not really what's going on. The cookie bits are all for texture; they have virtually no flavor. There's a good deal of gingerbread flavor, but it's all in the doughnut icing. That's not really a bad thing, but a weird thing, as you can imagine. It's like a ventriloquist act where the dummy is the straight man -- nothing's where you expect it. It took me the whole doughnut to figure out what was so odd.

So there's my take on the three Dunkin' Donuts seasonal doughnuts; you may have a different experience. Or you may wish to report on what your local store or chain is up to. I may have more to add if I break down and go back for that Sugar Cookie monstrosity. I hate to be so rough on a chain store I enjoy, especially at this season of love and brotherhood. I'll say this: even if they had utterly dismal doughnuts at Dunkin', it'd still be worth going there for the coffee, and that's a plain fact, Rudolph. Go get ho ho hopped up on caffeine at Dunkin' this year.