Local doughnut shop wins TV contest
Sometimes a hobby can turn into something more.
Kris Wallace, owner of local doughnut shop Buy the Dozen, recently won a Cooking Network competition called Donut Showdown. She said she started making full-sized doughnuts after her experience on the show, which required contestants to make a variety of doughnuts around a Mardi Gras theme.
Daphne Jackson | Argonaut
Kris Wallace makes mini doughnuts with a machine designed specifically for that purpose. Wallace has
sold mini doughnuts for six years and full sized doughnuts for one year.
“When I came back, I knew I had won and I just thought ‘OK, I guess this is what I’m supposed to be doing now,’ so I started when I got back a year ago,” Wallace said. “And then I thought, ‘I’m in Idaho, I should be making potato doughnuts,’ so I started making potato doughnuts.”
She said her experience on the show was crazy and stressful in a good way, since she was less experienced with large doughnuts than the other competitors.
“I was just hoping not to embarrass myself, and then when I saw who the judges were, I was really freaked out,” Wallace said. “I thought it would be the judges from the first season, and those were Canadian personalities. And then I walked out when they introduced me, and I saw Duff Goldman and Elizabeth Falkner.”
The contest took place Feb. 10, 2014 but the episode didn’t air in the U.S. until almost a year later, Feb. 11, 2015. During the time in between, Wallace wasn’t allowed to talk about winning Donut Showdown. She said it still seemed strange to tell people about it after being quiet for so long.
Wallace said she decided to sell doughnuts at the Moscow Farmers’ Market six years ago after seeing a mini doughnut stand on a weekend trip to Pike Place.
“There was nothing at the Farmers’ Market that my kids could really share when they walked around,” she said. “Everything cost more than I wanted to spend, so I just thought it would be perfect for Farmers’ Market, and I was really shocked when we moved here that there wasn’t a doughnut shop.”
After several seasons in the Farmers’ Market, Buy the Dozen moved into a shop downtown. They are open mornings Wednesday through Sunday. Wallace’s husband John said he usually isn’t involved in running the shop.
“I’m more involved in the summer when we do Farmers Market,” he said. “Then I’m the setup and teardown guy, but she’s the doughnut maker, the doughnut creator. I’m just the labor.”
Buy the Dozen was especially crowded for the days after the episode first aired in the U.S. John said his wife’s participation in the competition was a positive experience overall.
“It was great that they invited her on, it was great that she was able to find someone to help her that had a knowledge base and was good at the whole baking thing,” he said. “And she was only gone for a couple days. We have four kids, so (she) left me home with those four kids, but we managed.”
Daphne Jackson can be reached at [email protected]