When I was a kid, the family habit was to stop on the way home from church at the L&M Bakery. (I’m so happy to see they’re* still in business and still getting rave reviews.) For the six of us, a reasonable guess might be that we’d get, say, a dozen doughnuts and be happy, right?

Oh, no. Nonononononooooo. Not my family. And not when buying from L&M. Try:

• Six or eight doughnuts, including at least one jelly doughnut and a couple chocolate-covered cream doughnuts (which were not the same thing as Boston Creme Doughnuts, you Philistines). Filled, so it seemed, from surface to surface. You’d bite into one of these suckers and you’d have to mop up all around your mouth, sometimes even your cheeks.
• Sticky cinnamon buns, with raisins. Maybe a half-dozen of these. The owners of the Cinnabon brand would fold up their franchises if they knew these existed.
• Crumbly cinnamon-topped “crumb buns.” A favorite of my kid brother, which (as I recall) indicated to me a certain lack of imagination. Until I tried one myself.
• A slab of something called “butter cake.” (I’m still not sure what exactly this was; I’ve never seen it anyplace else. Flat, pan-baked, maybe ¾-inch thick. Sweeeet topping, not quite icing… The topping cracked irregularly during baking, so each piece of butter cake looked like a miniature map of the continents just after they’d started to break up jillions of years ago.)

Now, we didn’t get ALL these things every week. But every week we did get enough, really, for ourselves and a couple neighbor families. Whom we’d never have dreamt of inviting unless they brought their own.

And it would all be gone by Sunday night. **

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