The shop is simple, airy and beautiful, all clean lines and white paint, the requisite chalkboard hanging in the back. On the front counter is a modest display of beautiful iced doughnuts in exciting flavors like lemon poppyseed, creme brulee, passion fruit cocoa nib, and their signature blueberry bourbon basil. To one side, gleaming steel bowls sit filled with powdered-sugar-covered filled doughnuts.
We chose the blueberry bourbon basil iced doughnut and a filled peanut butter with blackberry jam. (Because I cannot resist anything blackberry.)
Blue Star is known for its brioche dough, starring local flour and whopping amounts of high-end butter. This means their prices are on the high end for doughnuts, at $2.50 to $3.00 a pop. But wow. This was beautiful dough, airy and rich with just the right amount of chew. The blueberry bourbon basil icing was complex, sophisticated, and delicious – impressive since I’m not an enormous fan of any single member of that trio.
Even better was the peanut butter and blackberry jam doughnut, filled with an oozing pool of scrumptious, seedless blackberry jam. The peanut butter was on the outside; what I had mistaken for powdered sugar was, in fact, powdered peanut butter! I loved having the peanut butter flavor without its rich stickiness. Not that I’m against rich stickiness – far, far from it – but these doughnuts were plenty rich already.
I wished that I was hungry enough for another, but I wasn’t. So we refilled our coffee (Stumptown, very good) and wandered off into the beautifully overcast Portland day.
Talk to me!