New Dessert House satisfies a sweet tooth
By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com
Have you ever eaten a doughnut and thought to yourself, “This is excellent. I really, really like doughnuts, but I think it would be better if it were crispier, somehow.”?
Tanya Grenier has you covered.
She and her husband are the brains behind Tanya’s Waffle-Donuts. The Boscawen businesswoman described her product this way: “They look like a waffle,” she said. “They taste like a doughnut, but they’re not deep fried. They’re all made from homemade recipes, made from scratch.”
The idea for the waffle-doughnut came from a family trip, Grenier recalled.
“We were at an Airbnb with our daughter and our son-in-law,” she said. Her daughter asked her dad if he could make doughnuts for breakfast. “So they had all the ingredients to make them, but we didn’t check and they ended up not having oil. So we were like, ‘Oh, we can’t deep fry them.’ We ended up making pancakes with the batter. They looked like a pancake in a pan, but they tasted like a doughnut. They were amazing, but then my husband said, ‘You know what would be really cool, though? If it was the shape of a waffle it would be a little easier to pick up and like look really cool with a waffle shape.’”
The Greniers spent three years developing a recipe that would work.
“Basically,” Tanya said, “you can’t use a waffle recipe or a doughnut recipe. What you need to do is you’ve got to kind of combine them to get them to rise because most doughnut recipes are made to be deep-fried, and these are not.” Eventually, she said, the recipe came together. “The best part of these is they have less sugar than a regular doughnut, but they still taste just like a doughnut, but they’re not greasy. They’re light and fluffy. They’re not fried in oil at all. They’re all made in a waffle iron.”
Once the base recipe was worked out, the Greniers were able to develop a large number of variations on the doughnuts themselves, and an equally large number of frosting types, which have lent themselves to many combinations.
“We make a cake waffle doughnut, which is our original waffle doughnut,” Tanya said. “It has a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of nutmeg. We make a chocolate waffle doughnut, which is like a milk chocolate, almost — not a dark chocolate but like a milk chocolate doughnut. We make maple doughnuts and apple doughnuts. We’ve done banana doughnuts. We do a cornbread waffle doughnut. We do a potato waffle doughnut. We do carrot cake ones.”
The Greniers package some waffle-doughnuts for individual sale, but they are happiest when they serve them hot and crispy from their food truck.
“The food truck is called the Waffle Donut Wagon,” Grenier said, “and then when we sell them pre-packaged it’s called Tanya’s Homemade Waffle Donut. We usually only sell [the individually wrapped ones] at special indoor craft events. We’ve done horse shows, we’ve done weddings, birthdays, bridal showers, pretty much anything you can think of. We do that with the truck just because we can offer food items plus they’re hot off the press as we call it. We cook them to order so they get them hot off the press with everything like the frosting is like put right on top melted.”
Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon
Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon can be found at events throughout New Hampshire and can cater any event. Call 785-6283 for more information, or search for “Waffle Donut Wagon” on Facebook or @waffledonutwagon on Instagram.
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.
