Whimsy Doughnuts

In a recent post of mine, Momentum, doughnuts were involved. I received comments about how everything goes better with doughnuts. One comment, from My Life in Our Father’s World, (http://mylifeinourfathersworld.wordpress.com/) was as follows:

I’m very picky about my

.. but you are right, they added some whimsy to your post

And I replied: “Oooo, I wonder what a whimsy doughnut tastes like?!” and that I’d look it up and send her the recipe. Well this post is that recipe.

Whimsy defined is an unusual, unexpected, or fanciful idea, one that is quaint or filled with playful humor. Any of you have have read my posts know you can expect the unexpected and I am chock full of playful humor. So that makes me a whimsy filled doughnut!

In the mid-19th century and Elizabeth Gregory, a New England ship captain’s mother made a deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son’s spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind. Some say she made it so her son Hanson and his crew could store a pastry on long voyages, one that might help ward off scurvy and colds. In any case, Mrs. Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through, and in a literal-minded way called them doughnuts.

Her son always claimed credit for something else: putting the hole in the doughnut. Some cynical doughnut historians maintain that Captain Gregory did it to stint on ingredients, others that he thought the hole might make the whole easier to digest. Still others say that he gave the doughnut its shape when, needing to keep both hands on the wheel in a storm, he skewered one of his mom’s doughnuts on a spoke of his ship’s wheel. In an interview with the Boston Post at the turn of the century, Captain Gregory tried to quell such rumors with his recollection of the moment 50 years before: using the top of a round tin pepper box, he said, he cut into the middle of a doughnut “the first doughnut hole ever seen by mortal eyes.”

The first doughnut machine did not come along until 1920, in New York City, when Adolph Levitt, an enterprising refugee from czarist Russia, began selling fried doughnuts from his bakery. Hungry theater crowds pushed him to make a gadget that churned out the tasty rings faster, and he did. By 1931 Adolph Levitt’s machines were earning him $25 million a year, mostly from wholesale deliveries to bakers around the country.

By the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago, doughnuts were poster material, billed as “the food hit of the Century of Progress.” Seeing them produced “automatically” somehow made them part of the wave of the future. A doughnut cost less than a nickel, within reach of most of the Depression era’s victims.

My gift is encouragement. I’m also not bashful, so I can be bold in sharing it with others. I am always on the lookout for ways to bring joy into someone’s day. Defined it is to give support, confidence or hope to. My go to Bible verse for living this way is 1 Thess. 5:11, “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.”

Now in my opinion, the only way this post could get any better is is Minions were involved, and that is why I’ve included a picture of Minion doughnuts!

So I hope this recipe for encouragement will fill you with whimsy and the desire to share your “doughnuts” of joy with others every day!

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