Collegiate Times

If my nose ever broke up with me it would probably leave me for Carol Lee's doughnuts. With one step inside the modest shop on North Main, one gets the sense that life has changed forever.

Just inside the door, the doughnut case is towering and slightly intimidating. There are rows and rows of doughnuts. Standards like glazed, and chocolate and maple covered yeast doughnuts, crme-filled doughnuts and old-fashioned cake doughnuts, then slightly exotic ones like cake doughnuts with blueberries, or coconut covered doughnuts.

The real surprise, though, is that Carol Lee doesn't exist.

"There's nobody here by the name Carole Lee," said Sherree Surface, who runs the cake side of the business, Carol Lee Cakes. "(Carol Lee) was a doughnut franchise that started in Kansas. It's no longer in business; the franchise went out quite a few years ago, but Carol was Lee's secretary, and Lee was president of the franchise."

Blacksburg's Carol Lee's is a local, family-operated business that has been in the college community since 1968. The bakery is actually divided into two separate businesses. Carol Lee's Doughnuts is on one side of the shop, and then Carol Lee's Cakes, which works solely by special order, is on the other side. Norman Kidd ran the business until he passed it down to his daughters, Sherree Surface and Melinda Strager, who manage the cake and doughnut shops, respectively.

The doughnuts, though, are the big draw for college students. Surface attributed the doughnuts' appeal to their freshness and lack of grease and of course their price.

"And, of course, their price is attractive. They're cheap," said Surface. "You can treat a whole classroom for 10 bucks."

The doughnut making process, however, is very complicated, and according to Surface, "very laborious." Like any delicious, homemade food, many factors control the outcome of the product.

"You have to really know what you're doing. You have to deal with the humidity, with the yeast, with the temperature," said Surface. "The varying degrees of temperature and humidity really affect the doughnuts."

Strager comes in to make the doughnuts each day at 4 a.m. and has them ready by 6:30 a.m. when the shop opens its doors. Yeast doughnuts take about an hour to make, and cake doughnuts take only 15 minutes. Strager put their variety at around 40 different pastries.

"We get 40 dozen per batch," said Strager. "So we make two or three on a normal day, and six, seven, or eight on a busy day." If your jaw hasn't dropped you haven't done the math. Eight batches at 40 dozen per batch is 3,840 doughnuts on the busiest of days.

The strangest, and somewhat heartbreaking thing about Carol Lee's bakery is the sisters aren't really that into eating doughnuts. Surface hasn't had a doughnut in 20 years, and Strager said she only eats them occasionally.

When thinking back to his first Carol Lee's doughnut freshman year, fifth year architect major Adam Feuerstein said, "It was incredible." His first was a braided cinnamon twister.

"I just stumbled in there freshman year," said Feuerstein. Now he said he tries to go at least once a month. When he makes it, he says he goes for the variety pack, and puts in some twists, a few glazed, but also tries to sample some he hasn't had before, being especially pleased with the maple glazed and the Halloween-themed doughnut.

"For Halloween they have the ones with the sprinkles. They made them black and orange," said Feuerstein. "I like sprinkles."

Both Surface and Strager are very pleased to have the students vote them the best bakery in Blacksburg. But are any of us really surprised?

"People tell us they're the best doughnuts they've ever had," said Strager. "We get a lot of people who have been all over the world and think ours are the best."