Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

For the past several years my wife Anne and I have made a tradition of going somewhere — anywhere but home — for each of our birthdays. Last year my birthday trip was among the billions of traditions ruined by the pandemic, all of which paled in significance to the millions of lives lost (and still counting). This year is a different story. Anne and I have each received our pairs of Pfizer shots and reached full efficacy as of April 24th. This past Friday and Saturday the two of us drove out of Indianapolis and found a few places to visit in our eminently imitable road-trip fashion…

Whereas Friday the 14th took us south of Indy, our feature destination on Saturday the 15th was north of town. On the way up, we detoured for a morning sugar boost at a new shop in Fishers called Ohana Donuts and Ice Cream, a name that should ring a bell for fans of Disney’s Lilo and Stitch. (LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The establishment in question features no explicit Disney imagery, homages, or other litigious temptations to any Disney attorneys living or undead.)

As the name hints, Ohana is the an entrepreneurial dream of a family of Hawaii superfans — not actual Hawaiians, though they’ve certainly racked up frequent-traveler points. They opened for business in February 2020, which…well, honestly, it’s a miracle any restaurants survived 2020, let alone newcomers without a strong preexisting customer base to carry them through the pandemic. (PPP loan approval helped.) Working on a hot tip from Google Maps we made ourselves a sugar connection.

Rather than fill up display cases with ready-made snacks, all their donuts are topped to order. Using solely vanilla cake donuts as the base, customers fill out a paper order form that lets them choose one of seven different icings, and one topping from a list of a couple dozen or so — candies, nuts, fruits, cereals, and so on. I’m a lifelong fan of glazed yeast donuts and on record as a cake donut hater, and was taken aback at first. Between the freshness, the warmth, and the recipe, they made it work, even for a skeptic like me.

For me the pièce de résistance was their Donut Breakfast Sandwich, as seen in our lead photo. It’s a tad smaller than the donut burgers found at our Indiana State Fair, and required a fork-and-knife plan of attack due to its lovable embrace of sticky icing, but it’s nowhere near as greasy as its carnival cousins. Meanwhile, Anne decided to sample their ice cream, which was indeed available during breakfast hours for anyone who can’t wait for ordinary ice cream shops to open at 11 and knows the nearest McDonald’s shake-and-sundae machine is offline as usual.

Our visit wasn’t without its hitches. They dropped my sandwich halfway through making it and had to start over, which required a microwave for at least one step. More in our favor, though, two different proactive servers had made the vanilla latte I ordered, so I ended up with double drinks to carry through the next leg of our journey and then some, in case the sugar wasn’t enough to send me soaring.

To be continued! Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: The Animal Refugees
Part 2: Muscatatuck Everlasting
Part 3: Had Myself a Ball in a Small Town
Part 5: Maximum Bob Ross
Part 6: Tangents from the Joy of Painting
Part 7: Nature and Other Valuables
Part 8: Mondo Muncie Miscellany