What's so special about a doughnut?

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Located on West 23rd near Hotel Chelsea is The Doughnut Plant, featuring unique décor and a menu to match. Much like typical breakfast bakeries and doughnut shops, The Doughnut Plant offers three different specific styles of doughnuts: yeast, cake and filled—with a multitude of flavors for each doughnut style as well as hot drinks. Photo by Kristen Lee

The shop prides themselves on making doughnuts that use all natural, high quality and organic ingredients for their fresh doughnuts. Yet the doughnuts, while elaborate, lack strong flavor and are utterly unmemorable.

During my visit to The Doughnut Plant I spent a good five minutes debating which doughnuts of their wide variety to try. I eventually decided to try a yeast doughnut and cake doughnut—the Valrhona Chocolate and Wild Blueberry, respectively.

While the doughnuts stood out from those of other doughnut shops in their elaborate appearance and unique offering, both were mostly tasteless.

The Valrhona Chocolate yeast doughnut was not completely a chocolate doughnut, but an incredibly dense yeast-raised doughnut. While it sweetly smelled like chocolate, it tasted more like baked dough than like the chocolate icing on top.

Photo by Kristen Lee

The Wild Blueberry, a cake doughnut, had a widely differing texture from the yeast doughnut. The cake doughnut indeed had the texture of an “intersection of a classic birthday cake and a buttery pound cake,” as The Doughnut Plant’s website describes them. However, like the Valrhona Chocolate, the blueberry doughnut lacked the flavor the name boasted and was rather sweet because of the sugary, fruit glaze on the outside which did not balance well. Understandably, blueberries aren't a fruit that packs much of a flavor punch, but despite the bits of real blueberry in the cakey doughnut, I couldn't taste a hint of it.

The Doughnut Plant is located in the Lower East Side and Chelsea. Prices range from $3 and up. Check doughnutplant.com for more information and the full menu.