Tucked away in a long block of storefronts fixed between neatly lined residential homes in the suburb of Belmont is Little & Friday, a bakery and café that serves up some of the best New Zealand-style doughnuts in Auckland.
These massive treats, coated with powdered sugar and bursting at the seams with raspberry jam and homemade cream, are now a staple in the community. Since the shop’s opening in 2007 they have become one of the most popular items on the menu.
Owner Kim Evans started Little & Friday as a way to earn extra money to pay her bills, selling cakes only on Fridays directly out of a small kitchen in an old butcher’s shop. Located in one of the five storefronts on Eversleigh Road, this shop houses her three kitchens, bakery and café.
Doughnuts, New Zealand
Style
These two Auckland hotspots typically sell out completely, so try some of the country's sweetest treats before they're gone
Cara Walker
Jonathan Norris
Evans concocted her dough based on a stuffed brioche recipe she had already created, so she wouldn’t need to whip up different kinds of dough batches. She settled on a cream-filled style, reminiscent of childhood doughnuts she recalls splurging on at the local mom-and-pop dairy (general store), where she was sent to pick up Sunday bread in the 1960s.
“Doughnuts are a memory food—food that creates memories,” Evans said. “I remember this old man came in one day, and he cried—he got so emotional—because it brought back memories of his childhood, of eating doughnuts like that. No one makes doughnuts like that because it’s so labor intensive.”
Evans fries her doughnuts in coconut oil instead of the traditionally used baking oils, which set them apart from the heaps of people who have started selling similar cream-filled treats over the last several years. This is also why Little & Friday typically sells out of the 400 doughnuts prepared each weekday and the 700 doughnuts prepared on Saturdays and Sundays.
Across town in the Ponsonby Central Market, another popular shop prepares its doughnuts similar to Little & Friday, but with a customer-engaged twist. Foxtrot Parlour’s original ‘inject-your-own’ doughnuts idea originates from a vintage icing set Tara Brogan, owner, found at her grandmother’s home.
“It came about not particularly by design but by default really,” she said. “We were making the doughnuts and we were coming up with all the different things. This was really so it could be tactile and fun.”
Similar to the brioche-based style found throughout Auckland, Brogan’s doughnuts are sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and come with four different flavor options—salted caramel, berry coulis, valrhona chocolate and Tahitian vanilla—but with an added twist. Along with their doughnut, customers get a shiny, silver icing syringe loaded with the flavoring of their choosing, an interactive feature that Brogan says is very trendy in the food world right now.
She also credits the success of her doughnuts to the social media popularity that made them go viral. Although they have upped their batches after this surge of publicity, with only 25 or so prepared each weekday, Foxtrot is usually sold out by 2 p.m.
“Sometimes we just can’t make enough doughnuts,” she said.
Little & Friday's
OPENING HOURS
Monday - Friday
7:00 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Saturday - Sunday
8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Belmont Kitchen special hours:
Wednesday - Sunday
5:30 p.m. - 8 p.m.
LOCATIONS
Main Kitchen:
No. 43D, Eversleigh Road
Belmont, Auckland
Newmarket:
No.11, McColl Street
Ponsonby:
No. 42 Douglas Street
LOCATION
Ponsonby Central Market:
7 Richmond Road
Ponsonby, Auckland
OPENING HOURS
Monday - Friday
7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Saturday - Sunday
8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
