When asked what I like about Singapore, friends and family aside, I will almost certainly rave about the food. Some of my fondest memories of Singapore were eating roti prata when I was maybe around 6 or 7 years old. Moreover, growing up in Canada with a Peranakan mother and a Hokkien father meant I got to eat my fair share of bak kut teh (骨肉茶) with yu char kway (油條), yong tau foo (釀豆腐), goreng pisang, nasi lemak, popiah, laksa, bakkwa (肉幹) and the list goes on.

But over the past year I had the opportunity to try some foods in Singapore that I hadn't typically been exposed to during my holidays in Singapore when I was younger. In particular, the humble doughnut.

I suppose it's just something about being in Singapore on vacation that my parents would always try to maximize the amount of intake of food we couldn't easily get back home. So doughnuts just never came into the picture. And arguably, why would you want to eat a Boston cream-filled doughnut when you could instead have a nice tau sar pau (豆沙包) instead? And so my winters in Singapore were always filled with curry puffs, and other types of pau (包子) or Nyonya kuehs.

But since I was in Singapore not for vacation, but for school and work, inevitably the delightful doughnut came back to me.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like doughnuts. On the contrary, I love a good chocolate dip doughnut from everyone's favourite Tim Hortons. It's a Canadian classic. Or perhaps the maple dip is more of a Canadian classic. But you get my drift.

The doughnuts in Singapore, however, look a lot less humble than my familiar Tim Hortons doughnuts. Doughnuts in Singapore are a bit of an art form. They are dressed to the nines. They are so well decorated that I almost don't have the heart to eat them. The photo below is am example of this. And note that the doughnuts pictured there are actually of "Timbit" size, or doughnut hole size. But full-sized doughnuts are dressed in a similar fashion (or actually, perhaps even more).

They look so fancy.

Yet, after your first bite (if you've ever had a Tim Hortons doughnut), you will soon realize maybe it would have been a better choice to have handed over your hard earned cash to the hawker selling tau sar pau, rather than the glowing doughnut shop owner. I don't know what it is, but the doughnuts I had in Singapore just lacked flavour. They felt more like bread with fancy toppings. They lacked that sort of dense (for dense doughnuts) or fluffy (for fluffy doughnuts) feeling that the doughnuts at Tim Hortons have.

And so I came to my conclusion that I missed Tim Hortons.