The Emperor's New Doughnut

Yesterday I decided to check out a store that has recently opened at a nearby shopping centre. Doughnut Time it was called. It was a cool hole-in-the-wall with a retro neon sign above and music playing. It was surrounded by a crowd of young adults and was obviously very popular with them.

They were selling doughnuts at six dollars a piece.

I purchased a doughnut with the somewhat witty name of "Ferrero No Share". It looked pretty good. On the doughnut was a thick chocolate topping which I had assumed was something like a ganache, with some crumbled hazelnut and topped with a Ferrero Rocher chocolate.

 

It tasted horrible. It was amazing how bad it was.

The doughnut itself was a moderately good yeast doughnut, but it was completely ruined by the topping. Rather than the beautiful creamy chocolate it appeared to be, it was instead a tasteless, sickly-sweet glaze which for some unknown reason had an unpleasant gritty texture as well. How they managed this I have no idea. The Ferrero Rocher on top was stale (and they go like chocolate flavoured cardboard when this happens), but still managed to taste good by contrast.

It was less good than a 50¢ Coles doughnut.

The name certainly made sense; you wouldn't want to share it - at least not with anyone you liked.

 

The packaging of this thing contained hip references to trendy stuff such as Snapchat and so I thought I'd check out the hashtag on Twitter. I had always thought that Twitter had a high proportion of cynical people eager to skewer pretentious nonsense like this and I anticipated pages of witty one-liners lampooning this textbook example of style over substance.

But instead it was full of people glorying in the delicious worderfulness of these decadent treats with not a negative voice to be heard. People were bragging (with photographic evidence) about how they were treating themselves to a six-pack of the nauseating things; which is a quantity I have difficulty in imagining any human being able to ingest in a sitting.

Have the marketers (they are certainly not cooks) running the company employed an army of paid trolls to overwhelm the social media or are people really such sheep?

Seemingly the latter: This business has supposedly expanded from a single store last year to over twenty at the moment. Obviously they're very popular and certainly the local store was. The kids were mobbing the place - something I have never seen at the local bakery which has mud-cake slices that are a thousand times better for half the price.

Still, this is in the electorate that recently reelected Peter Dutton (albeit by a very narrow margin), so the qualities of independent thought and good taste are obviously in short supply.