Photos by Cosmic Donuts
Cosmic Donuts is a family-run Hudson Valley café that’s all about specialty cake and yeast donuts that range from sweet to savory to stellar.
Donuts are awesome. From old-fashioned cakey confections to yeasty pillows of deliciousness, they’re the sort of treats that are just as wonderful for breakfast alongside a cup of hot coffee as they are for an afternoon pick-me-up. They’re equally wonderful with a simple chocolate glaze as they are stuffed to the brim with sweet and tangy raspberry jelly or sprinkled with quirky cereal toppings.
Simple pleasures though they may be, they bring with them a joy that never fails to create smiles. And in Kinderhook, they’re out of this world.
Thanks to Cosmic Donuts, extra-stellar sweets will soon make a star-studded appearance in the Hudson Valley. When the Columbia County storefront opens early this fall, it will bring with it a roster of donuts that are inventive, off the wall, and entirely addictive.
“We really wanted to do something different,” explains co-owner Jhori Jurgenson. “We’ve been to other donut shops in the past that have big, extravagant donuts and we always wanted one around here.”
For Jurgenson, a makeup artist by trade, Cosmic Donuts is a family affair. Channeling her past experience working in a bakery, she collaborates with her mother, a kitchen cook at a local farm, and her boyfriend, a police officer, to launch her very first concept donut shop in the Hudson Valley.
And what a concept it is. As the name suggests, Cosmic Donuts is anything except cookie-cutter. The shop itself is a sea (or should we say a solar system?) of color, with neon-bright purples and greens covering the walls. A galaxy mural adds to the outer space theme, with alien décor to come.
“It’s basically when you walk inside your eyes don’t know here to go,” she says. “You want to go inside and see the shop, you want to take photos.”
Of course, the donuts are the true pièce de résistance inside the shop, which sits right on Albany Avenue in Kinderhoook. They’re a mix of yeast and cake varieties, with an emphasis on extravagant and crazy flavors.
“It’s totally different from whatever people had in the past,” Jurgenson explains. “We’re mixing ingredients, cultures, and concepts into our food.”
Indeed, Cosmic Donuts runs on the wild side in the best way possible. With inspiration for new concoctions coming from everywhere (including Jurgenson’s 10-year-old), no ingredient, topping, or filling is out of the question. So far, Jurgenson and her family have stacked donuts with gummy bears, infused them with lavender, and stuffed them with cheesecake filling.
They’ve even gone savory, with mouth-watering bites like jalapeno cheddar with a goat cheese topping planned for the ever-changing menu. In the mornings, they’ll offer breakfast sandwiches on donuts, with a side of the Berkshires’ No. Six Depot coffee to round out a perfect start to the a.m.
When asked about her favorite donut experiment so far, Jurgenson admits that it’s hard to pick a favorite. That being said, she swooned over the key lime pie buttercream-stuffed version that she topped with lemon glaze. The midnight snack donut is another close contender, since it featured everything from M&Ms to popcorn and pretzels.
To perfect their core donut recipe, the Cosmic team experimented for two and a half months before hitting upon a batter that was perfect. Now that the renovation of their Kinderhook kitchen is almost complete, they’re looking forward to continue test-driving flavors as they get closer to opening. They plan to rotate offerings frequently to make the most of locally sourced ingredients and keep visitors on their toes.
Because Jurgenson’s stepfather co-owns Samascott Orchards in town, she plans to get much of her produce straight from the farm. As far as coffee goes, in addition to serving up No. Six Depot, she’ll also incorporate Vietnamese and Cuban coffee on the menu as a way to spotlight different cultures.
With an opened planned for the beginning of September, Cosmic Donuts will be a true destination for donut lovers across the Hudson Valley. While Jurgenson and her family are still working out final details, they do plan to have limited indoor seating, along with counter service and takeout. For Instagram aficionados, they’ll have an extraterrestrial selfie station for otherworldly photo ops.
Until the shop’s grand debut, Cosmic Donuts welcomes flavor suggestions from the Hudson Valley community on social media. Because the menu is still being finalized, Jurgenson and team are having fun taste-testing treats as indulgent as a Fruity Pebbles donut stuffed with a cereal milk-infused buttercream and a strawberry cheesecake-filled one topped with vanilla glaze and more cheesecake filling, then sprinkled with dried raspberries and golden Oreos.
“It’s very extravagant and so good,” Jurgenson says, adding that the s’mores one with toasted marshmallow will be perfect for the shop’s autumnal grand opening.
“We just really want people to travel to us as a destination and cater to locals,” she notes. With donuts on the brain, she envisions extending Cosmic into wedding catering and featuring over-the-top treats like donut ice cream sandwiches and donut hole ice cream cones in the future. After all, at a shop like Cosmic Donuts, out-of-this-world ideas happen daily.
Cosmic Donuts
Kinderhook
