A South Bay Pop-Up Is Reinventing the Doughnut

The contents of a pink doughnut box are usually pretty predictable — chocolate- or sprinkle-covered rings that offer a bit of sweetness and chewiness to get you through your morning. But at Eizel’s Bakery, a pop-up in the South Bay, some of the doughnuts are glazed with crackly caramelized sugar while others are filled with saucy crustaceans. Another Korean-inspired, doughnut-adjacent treat erupts with garlicky custard when you bite in.

Of course, Eizel’s isn’t the first bakery to try to reinvent the doughnut. But the way the pop-up blends classical pastry techniques with a wildly multicultural palette of flavors and ingredients sets it apart from the crowd.

Like so many other home bakers, Eizel Mafnas started her pop-up in 2021 as a way to connect with her community during the pandemic. Then, as now, she juggled the bakery with an IT job at the Stanford Children’s Hospital. “I thought, what’s the harm in starting a business?” says Mafnas. “If it works out, great I’ll keep doing it while it’s still fun for me. Three years later, I’m still having a lot of fun — though it is a lot of work.”

Mafnas began by selling brownies, using a recipe she refined over years of baking for family and friends. Now, the business has evolved to include Bombay chex mix, bacon jam empanadas and, as of this year, a creative collection of both sweet and savory doughnuts.

A couple of Mafnas’s doughnuts are inspired by the flavors of the Philippines, where she grew up. “I’m most proud of my ube doughnut,” says Mafnas. “I wanted to make something for the person who hasn’t had any exposure to Filipino culture.” The purple doughnut features ube in three ways: She fills ube brioche with creamy ube jam and sprinkles the outside with ube polvorón, a common shortbread she grew up eating in the Philippines. Another doughnut features calamansi, or Filipino lime. The final product feels like a hybrid between sponge cake and key lime pie, oozing with tangy custard.

For some of her more multicultural doughnuts, Mafnas draws inspiration from dishes at some of her favorite restaurants. One of the most striking examples is a crawfish doughnut inspired by the crawfish beignets at Brenda’s French Soul Food in San Francisco. In Mafnas’s version, crawfish meat is stuffed into a savory brioche doughnut along with a garlicky Cajun sauce and gooey cheese so that the inside of the pastry gets a little bit soggy. It’s like the inverse of using crusty bread to soak up the sauce on a seafood plate.

When Dubai chocolate bars went viral on social media earlier this year, Mafnas spun a doughnut version complete with homemade pistachio cream. And for the pumpkin spice season, she created a pumpkin cake doughnut topped with pecan praline, pumpkin caramel and a cream cheese glaze. “It’s a nice challenge to see what you can make into a doughnut,” says Mafnas. “Before it would take me weeks to figure out a doughnut. Now, it takes me a few days.”

By watching Jacques Pépin and other PBS cooking shows like America’s Test Kitchen, Mafnas learned to think about how ingredients interact with each other rather than simply following a recipe. “Baking allows me to get creative and break that mold that things have to be precise, “ says Mafnas. “But I’m having a hard time with apple fritters — I fried it, and it just disintegrated.”

She’s persistent, though, and commits to developing recipes even when faced with hurdles. (She’s still working on those apple fritters!) Her ability to turn anything into a doughnut might seem like magic, but really, she’s gotten the process down to a science. Every single detail is carefully considered, like the balance between sweetness and acidity or whether a pastry needs some element to add textural contrast. Every doughnut’s filling complements its exterior — for example, the crème brûlée doughnut has a sticky, shattering top with a touch of bitterness that’s counteracted by the dollop of sweet custard inside.

Mafnas and her team produce their goods out of a commercial kitchen, but Mafnas says they’re close to outgrowing the space. Aside from popping up at farmers markets and events, Eizel’s baked goods are also stocked at coffee shops in San Jose. During a recent Sunday morning pop-up at the Japantown Farmers Market, a crowd of customers waited patiently in line — and many of the most popular doughnuts sell out within the first two hours of any given event, Mafnas says.

“I hope to one day open my own doughnut shop and bring in other things,” says Mafnas, “There’s so much more in my head I want to bring out to folks.”

Eizel’s Bakery pops up at farmers markets and events around the South Bay. The next pop-up is at Pour Decisions (5700 Village Oaks Dr. #20) in San Jose Saturday, Nov. 9. For information about future pop-ups, check out Eizel’s Instagram page. It will attend the SJ Made Holiday Fair (Santa Clara Convention Center) on Nov. 29–30.