(Photo: Hannah Whitaker/New York Magazine)

• BabyCakes NYC

  248 Broome St., nr. Ludlow St.; 212-677-5047

  BabyCakes’ Erin McKenna has a rule of thumb to guide her in her baking life: “Everything has to be not just fine for vegans or gluten-free but, you know … worth it, worth eating and really delicious.” Recently, she took this mission statement of sorts and applied it to a batch of doughnuts, and it’s not too much to say that the competition (vegan, gluten-free, and otherwise) should consider themselves put on notice. Crisp-edged, moist-crumbed, and exuding pure doughnutty flavor at every pore, these sinkers come in two sizes and a variety of rotating flavors, chocolate-glazed, coconut-lemon, and a churro-ish cinnamon-sugar among them. Incredibly, McKenna claims that the doughnuts are baked, not fried, and made from things like garbanzo-bean flour, arrowroot, potato starch, and applesauce. We’ll just have to take her word for it.

From the 2010 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine