Sugarcoated: Garlanded with Christmas designs, California Donuts spreads sweet holiday cheer

In an era when dessert is often evaluated by its Instagram potential, Los Angeles shines as one of the world’s premier cities for sweet treats. Join Daily Bruin staffers each week as they visit different dessert joints, going behind the scenes to give you an exclusive look into the creation of trending sugary concoctions.

California Donuts brought a white chocolate Christmas to a temperate Los Angeles.

With multiple holiday-themed doughnuts – from one with a panda in a red hat to another with Santa’s head sculpted on it – California Donuts on West 3rd Street knows what season ’tis. At least, that was the general vibe of the storefront display when I visited the Koreatown dessert joint to learn more about how the employees craft their many artisanal doughnuts. The dessert place is meant for window-shoppers, as customers purchase their treats through an ordering window outside the employees-only building where the pastry art comes together.

The store’s manager brought me inside to get my hands dirty with a Christmas creation of my own, but not until after showing me the process of creating a basic, unglazed doughnut, which would soon serve as the base of the more ornate one I would later make.

Employees hand-sculpt dough into shape, then fry the doughnuts on both sides, leaving them to dry. The decorations are done by hand in a back room, which is where I met one of the employees who would be teaching me how to create a Christmas tree-inspired jelly doughnut. After placing strawberry slices on a vibrant pink pastry she was creating for future sales, she ushered me toward the table beside her.

She explained the tree doughnuts are first dipped into melted white chocolate for a few seconds and then placed in a freezer to harden. The employees had already prepared two, effectively bringing us to the decorating stage for our pastry – which should be noted as one of the easier-to-replicate Christmas designs the store had to offer, among others like a Santa suit, complete with an icing belt and buttons.

We took a piping bag filled with green-colored white chocolate and drizzled a zigzag pattern across the doughnuts, making the lines longer with each turn to mimic the shape of a tree. We then placed a pinch of multicolored sprinkles across the doughnuts, but they tended to only stick to the green drizzle, reminiscent of lights on a tree. We placed a circular, yellow candy-coated chocolate at the apex of the tree and piped chocolate onto its base to finish decorating the top of the doughnuts. Finally, we filled our doughnuts with raspberry jelly.

The employee’s tree came out beautifully, but mine looked more like a green square, and jelly was spilling out the bottom because I accidentally put too much filling in the doughnut. Clearly, even designing the doughnut was not as simple as it seemed, and it left me impressed as to how the more intricate pastries came together in such massive quantities, considering one even had a mermaid tail jutting out of the middle.

After laboring so heavily on my flawed doughnut, I was now able to indulge in the reward of eating it. My pastry fell apart as I bit into it, though, because I had apparently made the bottom of the doughnut unstable with the mass of jelly I had inserted. So I ate the professionally made one instead. As I bit into it, the white chocolate glaze’s sugary flavor and the raspberry jelly complemented each other well, and the doughnut tasted perfectly moist, rather than dry, though very sweet.

Before leaving, I checked out the window display again, admiring the intricacies of many of the items California Donuts had to offer. The festive doughnuts kept catching my eye, as I made note of the many duplicate Christmas trees that all looked better than mine.

With the many hours that clearly went into creating the hundreds of doughnuts on sale, I was able to have myself a merry little Christmas (tree doughnut).

HOOLIGAN to bring second storm to UCLA with adaptation of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’

Yellow raincoats, high-pitched voices and “talkies” will usher in HOOLIGAN Theatre Company’s fall season.

The company will perform a stage adaptation of the 1952 film “Singin’ in the Rain” at the Ralph Freud Playhouse starting Friday. The film chronicles the transition of silent-film costars Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont to talking films. Don struggles with the need to cross over to speaking films to further his career while Lina attempts to maintain stardom despite her unbearable voice. Director Jakob Garberg, a third-year English student, said even though the adaptation features the same plot and music as the film, some aspects, including personal performances and modernized dances, were adapted for the stage.

“(The show is) centered around Don’s change. We’re celebrating classic 1920’s Hollywood,” Garberg said. “A lot of the set pieces, … they’re meant to look fake. It’s showing this world isn’t entirely genuine – it’s very artificial. But through the acting you see these real human people come out. Even in this fake artificial world, there’s still room for humanity and genuine human nature.”

To emphasize the character development, actors’ let their personalities seep into the characters. Hila Oz, the third-year integrated theater studies student who portrays Lina, said she has never seen the movie or past Broadway productions, so she often draws from her own personality to act out the character. To express Lina’s anger at her studio boss in one scene, Oz said she draws from her own characteristics, such feelings of anxiety and franticness.

“It’s really exciting and kind of nerve-wracking and anxiety-inducing to play a really well-known and beloved character without having any knowledge of how she’s been played in the past,” Oz said. “In that way, I’ve made Lina completely my own. She is really my Lina.”

The musical numbers also allowed each actor’s individual personality to come through, said Danielle Jensen, a fourth-year theater student and choreographer of the production. All actors had to learn tap dance, but Jensen individually developed certain dance styles for each lead actor based off what they were comfortable doing and what their best style of dance was, she said. At the beginning of the production process, she said actors experimented to find their own comedic style and craft their character.

For instance, when working with the actor who plays Cosmo Brown, a friend of Don, Jensen choreographed his movements to intentionally accentuate and coincide with musical beats to create a more comedic personality, she said. In the number “Good Morning,” in which characters from the film dance at 2 a.m. after resolving a conflict at their film set, actors express their ideas of funny facial expressions or sounds to go along with the music as it shifts to convey a Hawaiian environment or the arrival of a Spanish conquistador, Jensen said.

Choreography for some of the musical numbers, such as “Good Morning” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” is true to the film, Jensen said. For example, in the musical number “Singin’ in the Rain,” Don jumps into puddles. To give the illusion of the wet weather in the film, Garberg said a combination of blue lights and rain-drop textures will accompany the actors’ dance movements.

However, some aspects of the original film will be altered for the stage, Jensen said. Certain musical numbers will blend both modern and classical dance styles, such as in “Broadway Melody.” The choreography includes ballroom-style partnering and a tap section.

To appeal to modern audiences, the choreography constantly shifts focus. Actors are tossed back-and-forth in the background while various groups pass through the stage and depart, unlike in the film, which primarily showcases Don’s movements, she said. In fact, the musical numbers provide a lighthearted element to the show, despite the plot’s focus on the characters’ struggle to transition to talking films, Jensen said.

“Everything back then used to be cleaner-cut, very prim and proper,” Jensen said. “We let this one go a little bit just to be more fun and spontaneous and sporadic.”