friday field trip

They only sell coffee, donuts, and fried chicken.  My interest was in the donuts.  I heard there were some imaginative flavors offered and I wanted to check it out.  I looked up the address of Federal Donuts…1219 South Second Street.  Great.  I usually go everywhere in Philly by walking or by public transportation, but we would save time by driving…I heard these donuts sell out early!  My sister, daughter, and I headed out early morning.

The store turned out to be a very unassuming, tiny little shop, with six counter stools and no parking in a Pennsport neighborhood.  I guess we lucked out that there was only one person in the shop when we arrived, so we were able to sit at the counter.  Lucky because we could take our time analyzing our treats…each of us eager to decide our favorite variety.

Not wanting to miss tasting any of the unique flavors, we ordered one of each from the menu of nine flavors offered…just to sample, mind you.  That included three ‘hot’ donut flavors made to order:  indian cinnamon, appolonia spice, and vanilla lavender.  These donuts were coated while hot in a sugar/spice mixture.  The other nine flavors, called ‘fancy’ donuts,  were the same great, very light cake-type donut, coated with a flavorful glaze.

A photo of Federal Donuts’ current ‘fancy’ donut flavor offerings.

The flavors offered – definitely imaginative.  The taste – awesome!  I talked to the woman working in the store and the one regular customer seated at the counter.  I wanted to know about other donut flavor offerings…could I just be happy with the nine I was trying?  No.  I had to know what flavors I may have missed.  Torture!  Flavors are changed regularly.  Some past flavors included chocolate covered banana, pina colada, mandarin-coffee, s’mores, and root beer float.  So, even after deciding my favorite flavor, it could change on my next visit when different varieties may be offered.

At first I thought donuts and chicken were a wierd combination of food items to sell, but after thinking about it, both are fried.  Plus, Federal  covers both with unique seasonings and glazes.  Chicken seasonings include harissa and za’atar (no idea what these taste like!) and the glazes are chili-garlic and honey-ginger.  Although I am not crazy about fried chicken, after tasting the donuts, I DO want to try the chicken sometime!

My favorite this visit?  My favorite ‘fancy’ donut was the fig on fig.  My favorite overall was the vanilla lavender.  (My daughter chose strawberry rhubarb pie and vanilla lavender.) I asked at the shop for the current hot seller.  Can you guess?  Chocolate coconut.  I was surprised.  The shop thought the reason was because it was the most familiar flavor to customers.

As you can see by my ‘after’ photo of the leftovers, we basically only took ‘a little bite’ of each flavor as research!

I realized after I got home that I didn’t even get a photo of my favorite flavor…I guess it just wasn’t around long enough!

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