After receiving incredible support from Guelph residents during the lockdown, a doughnut store in Kitchener decided that it's time to open a location in Guelph.
“We’re super excited,” said Trudy Koen, co-founder of Lady Glaze.
The store specializing in fresh gourmet doughnuts will officially open its doors on Quebec Street Saturday.
“We’ve really had a really awesome clientele from Guelph from when we would deliver there, but also just the excitement from the community and our neighbours around the street. Everybody has just been reaching out and sharing how excited they are for us to come, it's been amazing.”
With their first store in St. Jacob's Market, the owners of Lady Glaze opened their second location in Kitchener in November, just months before the pandemic hit.
But rather than closing as a result of the pandemic, Koen said it was important for the business to keep going, so they refocused their business model and shifted entirely towards delivery.
“All through the lockdown, we were delivering within 60 km of Kitchener-Waterloo,” said Koen.
In doing so, they noticed a high demand for their products coming from Guelph.
“We already started thinking ‘we want to do another location, where is that location going to be?’ So it felt like a really good fit for us,” said Koen.
“We liked the idea of being downtown in Guelph. It’s obviously a great spot with great restaurants and bars activities around there.”
Each doughnut at Lady Glaze is hand made. The specialty store features 15 to 18 different flavours every month using natural ingredients.
“Like our vanilla sprinkle, our strawberry dough sprinkle, our Belmont cream which is our version of a Boston cream doughnut, and we have apple fritters every month,” said Koen.
She said the shop also carries seasonal flavours such as a back-to-school special featuring a doughnut topped with a honey glaze, candy and a slight salty trail mix. The specialty store also carries wine, beer, cider, ice cream and their version of Timbits.
Seasonal flavours include flavourful doughnuts specific to the season such as a hot chocolate doughnut which is stuffed with a chilli spiced chocolate ganache, topped with a white chocolate glaze, cocoa nib crunch and brownie pieces and even a buttered almond doughnut which is stuffed with praline cream and coated with vanilla bean glaze and candied almond slices.
“We have a menu that switches over basically every single month and those ones are fun ones. Like this month we have our salty trail mix kind of back to school inspired one,” said Koen.
With no preservatives, no artificial flavours or colours, the store focuses on batch production to ensure that doughnuts are always consumed fresh.
“We have bakers that come in in the middle of the night, early midnight and start rolling the dough. We hand-cut every doughnut. We proof every doughnut. Every doughnut is cut by hand,” said Koen.
She said the shop works hard to source as many ingredients locally as possible.
“We work with different vendors and farmer markets, different companies that provide our honey or our blueberry or put apples in our apple fritter,” said Koen.
“So in our strawberry glaze, the glaze itself is made fresh with real strawberries.”
Koen said the doughnuts are created the old fashioned way with raised yeast and a frying pan.
“They're not cake doughnuts that are baked so that makes a difference in terms of the texture of the base of the doughnuts,” said Koen adding that the creation process gives the doughnuts a gourmet independent experience that one wouldn’t get from a restaurant chain.
The doughnuts sold in the Guelph location will be made in the Kitchener location but glazed and decorated in Guelph.
“It brings a visual experience to it as well because you can see people designing the doughnuts and making them in the shop,” said Koen.
Lady Glaze will officially open its doors on Saturday at 10 a.m.