Kettle Glazed - Los Angeles

Now THIS is a donut shop! Conveniently seated in a small, seedy-looking shopping center on the corner of a long, dark highway-onramp street, there's no crowd to fight even on Saturday night.

Privacy breeds creativity, and the Cruffin' is so surprisingly out there it's hard to describe. The croissant dough maintains some crude layering, but the layers stack closely to make it dense and thick with all the best combo of croissant and muffin.

Annnnd Cronuts! Omg cronuts. Not quite worth the NYC hype with the mile-long lines, but the pastry-cream-chocolate-drizzle is worth at least a short one.

Even when not quite creative, Kettle Glazed is just plain delicious. The S'mores donut is filled with a small flurry of chocolate and marshmallow, a throwback to campfires and kumbaya.

You think you know what a Raspberry-Lemon Donut tastes like but you don't. This raspberry jam is less sickly-sweet than peanut butter's BFF, and it sits in a circle of lemon almost-icing that creates an exceptional balance.

I love anyone who can make a donut, but I bow to those who can make a tried-and-true taste like something exciting and new. I thought I'd tried all the donuts I've wanted to try, but it looks like I'm far from done with Kettle Glazed.

South Bay Cronut Crawl – Torrance & Manhattan Beach

When it comes to trends, I’m a little slow on the uptake. Razor scooters sounded too sharp, Gmail couldn’t possibly beat AOL, and I finished college before I got an iPod. So I guess it’s not so surprising that I waited months before trying the coveted cronut that took the foodies of New York City by storm.

Like all crazes, my cronut encounter started small, with these bitty two-biters at Lido Bakery. Sorry guys, sometimes size does matter, and Lido’s cronuts were just too little. The fluffy layers just didn’t stack up against the thick cream fillings. The Custard Cronut was weighed down by an eggy anchor, and the Pastry Cream Cronut wasn’t much better. In fact, I’m not sure it tasted any different.

The cronuts got bigger at Torrance Bakery, but bigger isn’t always better. The Cinnamon Sugar Cronut is creamless, and the impressively un-greasy lightness is a definite plus, but at the end of the day, it’s just a double-thick croissant in the shape of a donut plus a pound of cinnamon and sugar.

I had to go to Capicola for the real deal. And at $5 a pop, they got real pretty fast. But their whipped-cream-light-custard hybrid pastry cream is just perfect, and the proportions of the cronuts are just right. I loved the apple slices with caramel drizzle in the Caramel Apple Cronut, and if you simply swap the apples for chocolate chip, you get the Chocolate Chip Cronut, which makes for an easy but ecstatic bite.

I came, I saw, and I conquered the California cronut, but I don’t see what the fuss is about. These things can only blow your mind within two minutes after they’re made because then they get cold and weighed down by grease. A Cali cronut may not be even close to NYC, but even this crude sample conjures a pretty laughable image of New Yorkers spending hours in line. There are some trends I should follow more quickly, and I suffered for years without my iPod, but cronuts could definitely wait. And I really don’t regret not striking while the iron is hot, however I do regret not eating a cronut while it was still warm.