a donutOld-fashioned
also: old fashioned · sour cream old-fashioned · fry cake
The one that looks broken on purpose.
A cake ring with a cracked surface and tapered edges, glazed or sugared so the glaze pools in the cracks. The crack is the point: more surface, crisper edge, and a ring that holds up to coffee longer than a raised one.
The story Cited · wp-old-fashioned-doughnut
The name has moved. Nineteenth-century cookbooks print old-fashioned doughnuts made with yeast; the old-fashioned in a shop case today is a cake ring raised with baking powder or soda, and has been described as a subset of the cake doughnut. Older counters called cake rings fry cakes, and the terms doughnut, cruller and fry cake have been argued over for as long as anyone has written them down.
Commercial versions often start from a dry batter mix that takes only water, which is one reason the same crack shows up in shops two thousand miles apart.
How it is done Tradition
A stiff cake batter, chilled, cut thick. Into the fat cooler than a plain cake ring so the outside sets before the inside finishes lifting, which is what splits the surface. Glaze while warm.
Today Cited · wp-old-fashioned-doughnut
Sour cream and buttermilk versions sell as their own items in most shops, and the plain glazed old-fashioned is the one that gets ordered with black coffee.
The particulars
| dough | cake |
|---|---|
| finish | glazed |
| region | The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | usda |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | ? |
| vinegar | ? |
| butter or oil | ? |
| tomato | ? |
| sugar | ? |
| soy donut | ? |
| mustard | ? |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this donut |
Read from this page, 2026-09-17. USDA SR Legacy 174990, "Doughnuts, cake-type, plain (includes unsugared, old-fashioned)", published per 100 g and scaled here to the portion USDA itself lists as "donut" — 40 g. No ingredient list is published for these generic rows, so the ingredient ranks are null. A shop's own donut is not this donut; this is the closest published measurement of the kind. Every donut measured is on the donut page.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Pictures
Where we got it
- Old-fashioned doughnut — Wikipedia · link
- Cake doughnut — Wikipedia · link
- FoodData Central, SR Legacy — doughnut foods · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.