Mel's Donuts

Our next stop during our mini OC road trip was a small donut place in Anaheim...

I actually had the wrong address in the Garmin (I completely missed one digit from the address) and Bert actually spotted it as we were driving up Euclid...


"Hey, isn't that the place?"   he asked.

"It says it should be farther up the street...Maybe they have two locations. To be on the safe side, let's go there first"...I replied. So we turned around and drove back and lo and behold, there was really only one location and doofus me had the wrong address down.

Before entering Mel's, we admired this AWESOME orange El Camino parked on the street. All it needed was a German Shepard dog in the back.

Total throwback muscle car!

This is the strip mall sign to look for...

Mel's Donuts is next to Daniel's Burgers...

Why were we even here in the outskirts of Anaheim?

Well, recently, I was talking to my college age  nephews about bakeries in the OC. One of them really likes 85C and the younger brother recommended M&M Donuts to me. He said they were well known for their blueberry donuts. All right, hmmmm. I guess I live in a cave because I wasn't aware that there's been a blueberry donut trend. I don't follow these things, so I made a mental note to check out that place for a future trip.

After looking up the reviews and articles about M&M, Mel's name was also mentioned frequently so that made me curious. Turns out that M&M is only open from 9 pm to 12:30 am. WTF kind of hours are those? It turns out that M&M caters to the after hours Disney crowds. This place is also notorious for their 45 minutes to 2 hour WAIT for their famed donuts. Two hours? I hate even waiting ten minutes! Scratch M&M then. Mel's it would be for our visit.

The  main "competitor" to M&M was this place (but it turns out there are more donut shops in the OC and LA that either surpass or equal the blueberry donuts from M&M), Mel's. Plus, it was open 24 hours.

Their donuts looked like your run of the mill donuts you could get anywhere (galzed, sprinkles, old fashioned, filled, etc). Nothing fancy or gourmet here. But we wanted to try their version of the blueberry donuts, which they had in stock. I'm not sure how long they were in there (hopefully not since the day before!). We only wanted three. The gal at the counter said, "Are you sure you don't want a dozen?". Maybe they are used to folks buying up tons of these?

Their prices were right. About .75 for the donuts, a little more for the fancier ones.

$8.50 a dozen for the blueberry...

While Bert was pondering which other three donuts to get (we got a half dozen total), TC spotted this vending machine which sold the most random stuff, the kind you'd buy at a joke shop.

For only $1, you could buy a Whoopee Cushion! Yes, in three different colors to suit your puerile pranking needs.

If you didn't want a fart pillow, then you could also buy water guns, rubber bracelets, Scooby Doo playing cards,  or a swim snake (whatever that was)!

This was one of the three blueberry donuts we bought. This was the "vanity shot" before we entombed it in a plastic container we brought from home, which was placed in a cooler. Yes, we were prepared. We would be sampling this baby later on

And here are the other donuts seven hours later - coconut glazed, chocolate old fashioned, a maple bar and one of the blueberry trio.

These donuts had a nice fried exterior. I guess I was expecting them to be less brown?  They also had a criss cross pattern at the top. There was also a light glaze on these donuts, which we liked.

When broken into pieces, you can see the (artificial) bluish purple hue of the cake interior. The donut was not heavy. It had a nice "resistance" when biting into it, a bit of a slight crunch from the fried exterior and the sweet glalze, followed by the intense sweetness of the fake blueberry mix.

The "blueberry" bits you see are not real. These are from a mix, kind of like those blueberry muffin mixes you can get for $1 at the grocery store.

Hey, I'm no donut snob. A donut doesn't have to be "artisanal" to make me happy and I quite like those fake blueberry muffin mix muffins, thank you very much.

TC didn't really like them. Bert thought they were all right. Not having had the version from M&M, I don't have anything to compare this to. These were okay, I suppose. They were not, "OMG, I must have these AGAIN Pronto!", but they didn't completely suck either.  So there, that's the verdict.

That being said, I was reminded of this when we were eating these donuts:

That little girl was insufferable, wasn't she?

And here is the Tim Burton remake featuring that chick who plays the young Carrie Bradshaw in "The Carrie Diaries" (I only watched two episodes before deciding it wasn't worth my time; it was soooo not 80's authentic); she was great in "Soul Surfer" and "Bridge to Terabithia" though!

It was worth a quick stop since we were in the general area.  Now if only that M&M place had daytime hours. I think they do it just for the hype.

Mel's Donuts & Delis
2054 S. Euclid St.
Anaheim, CA 92902
(714) 530-4990

They do not have a website.

Reviews:
yelp (if you scroll down, check out Julie R's side by side review of Mel's vs. M&M - her version of the blueberry donut throwdown)

This is not a review of Mel's but an article about the blueberry donut trend, which is a few years old. The donut shops mentioned are competitors, M&M and Mag's, but a commenter did give Mel's some love. Not mentioned in the article is another place in Huntington Beach, the Donuttery, which supposedly has a really good blueberry donut.
OC Weekly, October 2011.

Our next stop would be Triple AAA once again. We were too early at the Costa Mesa location and it was not open. After that, a quick stop to Little Saigon!