Apple Fritter at Shipley's Donuts

One thing I learned in graduate school is that "snacktime" is not something reserved for the elementary school classroom. I wasn't particularly surprised that my peers needed some brain fuel midway through seminar, but for whatever reason I assumed that tenured professors possessed an unnatural endurance for discussing Hegel for hours on end with nary a cracker to help them through.

Thank God this is not the case, or else I might have never encountered a Shipley's apple fritter. My feminist studies professor brought a dozen to class one rainy Thursday morning, and I spent the remainder of the lecture marveling over one particularly magnificent specimen's amazing girth, corrugated iced exterior, and cinnamon apple-chunk filling. Thus ended my love affair with the simple glazed donut and my hunt for the Big Apple Fritter.

Most Shipley's have apple fritters but not all seem to sell the unusually large kind. And those locations that do offer the jumbo size, do so inconsistently, so that on any given day you might only find the regular and then wonder, as I have, if the BAF is really just a figment of your imagination.

If you ask the people at Shipley's, I'm sure they'll tell you that all their fritters are approximately the same dimensions, but I'm sticking to my guns about the monster fritter. A few days ago I visited my own neighborhood Shipley's hoping to spot a BAF. No luck, although the fritter I did snag was certainly hefty, a perfectly fried pocket of vanilla glaze and syrupy filling. Maybe next time I'll find its elusive big brother...