Pink BoxCake or raised
Every donut in the case is one or the other, and the whole shop is arranged around which.
Both drawings are cut through the ring, so the hole is the gap in the middle. The pale band across each one is the belt: the line where the donut floated before it was turned. On the cake ring the top splits as it fries, which is what an old-fashioned is sold for.
Raised
Yeast, proofed twice, about 150 seconds at 182–190 °C. Averages 38 grams. Comes out light, goes stale fastest, and takes a thin glaze while it is still hot enough to melt it.
Glazed rings, bars, fritters, bear claws, filled rounds, malasadas, pączki.
Cake
Baking powder or soda, dropped as batter, about 90 seconds at 190–198 °C. Runs 24 to 28 grams. Denser, holds a flavour, keeps longer, and takes sugar or a heavy icing rather than a thin glaze.
Old-fashioned, buttermilk bars, sour cream, blueberry, chocolate, cider donuts.
Who runs which
Both doughs, one kettle: raised goes up overnight and is fried first, cake batter drops after.
One raised ring, glazed hot in a window, and a sign that says the fryer is running.
One cake batter with cider in it, one machine, and six weeks of the year.
Raised, hand-pulled, no hole, and into the sugar straight out of the fat.
Neither yeast nor powder in the New Orleans version: steam lifts it and it comes out hollow.
Potato dough, risen overnight, cut square, and only on the Tuesday.
Both doughs plus an oven, because the klobasniky are baked and the donuts are not.
Out back
The steps the two doughs argue over.
Baker's yeast fermenting a sweet dough until it is full of gas — once in bulk, once again after the rings are cut.
A thick chemically-leavened batter dropped straight into hot fat through a hand-held or bench depositor, which forms the ring as it falls.
A warm humid cabinet where cut rings take their final rise before they go in the fat.
A shallow open kettle of hot fat with a screen, where every donut in the shop is cooked, turned once, and lifted out.
The fat itself: lard, beef tallow, vegetable shortening, or liquid oils — canola, soybean, palm.
A shallow pan of thin sugar glaze beside the fryer, where raised rings are dragged through face-down within a minute of coming out of the fat.
Rolling sheeted dough and cutting rings with a two-ring cutter, rather than depositing or buying pre-formed shells.
Frying times, temperatures, weights and oil figures come from the cited accounts on cake against raised, which disagree about the oil and agree about the direction. The drawings are this project's, not a photograph of any shop's donut.