I longed for the original cinnamon caramel donut and finally found it
I perfected the art of eating a Rise ‘n Roll donut laden with cinnamon powdered sugar while driving a car.
In the early to mid-2000s, I would get a fresh Rise ‘n Roll donut at its original location and eat it in six bites as I drove. I learned how not to end up covered in powder as I bit and chewed.
That bakery, which opened in 2004, sold yeast donuts that were made by rolling out a slab of dough and hand-cutting them. Then they were fried, topped with caramel icing, and coated in the blend of cinnamon and powdered sugar.
It’s the first place I ever encountered a donut that combined those flavors and it was to become the most famous food product in northern Indiana.
Though originally the cashew nut crunch from the same bakery was nicknamed “Amish crack,” now that label — whether you think it’s appropriate or not — is applied to the donut. The little bakery operated by an Amish couple without electricity has become a juggernaut cranking out thousands of donuts weekly. Most other local bakeries have copied their cinnamon caramel donut. It was the official donut for National Donut Day a few years back for Dawn Foods, whose products are in the donuts. (Greta Lapp Klassen wrote an excellent story on the history a few years ago.)
It’s easy to find recipes to make them at home. HopLore Brewing in Leesburg has even created an Amish crack flavor of imperial stout beer.
Tour buses pull up to the main Rise ‘n Roll bakery location along U.S. 20 between Middlebury and Shipshewana. That’s where donuts are produced for the now 15 locations of Rise ‘n Roll (if the website map is up to date).
The donuts you find in the stack boxes these days are perfectly round. They’re punched out of an extrusion machine into hot oil and then coated with the other things. They’re a good donut, but like other things are a victim of their success. They’re cousins of the donuts that were hand-rolled and cut, but not siblings. They are more dry and don’t have the same toothsomeness when you take a bite.
I’ve been missing the original donut for a while now. I mostly stopped eating the modern Rise n’ Roll version. It’s a good, even perhaps a great, donut. But fame has a way of changing just about any person or product and this one is no different.
I thought this donut would only live in my memory, tingling my tastebuds only when I imagined it. But then it appeared at another bakery, made by others in the food business whose work is informed by Amish and Mennonite cooking and baking. Sometimes you can go back in time. I found a place where the cinnamon caramel donut is made like it was originally 20 years ago in Middlebury.
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