While sitting there with my pink transparent three-inch shovel, trying to push powder and three droplets of water around a little plastic packaging container, a tired scene plays in my mind on repeat-one: a broken down and distraught single Japanese mom takes her toddler down the candy aisle in the grocery store cause he just wouldn't stop crying, and he makes grabby hands at this stupid little package of do-it-yourself donuts. He's been making these grabby hands for weeks. And the mom's muttering under her breath, "fuck it. We don't have the money for this, but if you want your miserable shit-ass donuts, that's what you'll get."
That's essentially the entire thought process that played out through my mind, as over the last three, five, hell, maybe even seven years of walking past these forlorn and sorry boxes with the promise of customizable mini donuts made from powder and water, proudly declaring "Popin'Cookin'" in bold red rounded English on the front of the box, and I get to decorate these mini donuts however I want? Sounds good! But I don't have the dedication or precision these require, I'm going to fuck them up.
But in much the same way that an advertisement for Krusty's Klown Kollege up-ended Homer Simpson's world for twenty-two minutes, so too was I eventually doomed to eventually spend twenty-two minutes reconstituting something approximating donuts from powder and water.
I posted a few pictures of the process and the instructions, along with my final results. The pictures I shared were hardly Instagram-worthy, and I was an influencer of poorly decorated donuts with haphazard sprinkles and frosting splayed inexpertly across the plate; some of it even got on the donuts. They were professional-looking, if the professional was drunk out of her mind. I ended up coming out with four donuts, the size of a quarter each. Interestingly enough though, after I had let it sit there for the time it took to create the sauce, something happened in the dough to make it taste like actual dough and not just powder and water mixed at room temperature.
The overall verdict was the same as the mother's thought from my prophetic daydream: these are indeed miserable shit-ass donuts. A half hour after eating them and the aftertaste is still haunting my mouth and scrapings of powder are still lurking in the crannies of my teeth, ready to pop out an hour or two from now with the passing notion of "remember those miserable shit-ass donuts you ate? Yeah."
Look, ah, just take my word for this. I know these things look tempting there on the shelf. But remember, not even crazy food witchery can ultimately deliver a tasty baked good from resuscitated powder and water mixed together with a transparent pink mini-shovel at room temperature. But by god, do they try, and that in and of itself is a noble thing.