AURORA | North Aurora will be getting a bit sweeter this fall thanks to the upcoming addition of Glazed and Confuzed, a tricked-out, specialty doughnut shop in the forthcoming Stanley Marketplace on Dallas Street.
Glazed and Confuzed’s satellite shop at Stanley will mark the doughnuteer’s second brick-and-mortar operation after the original at 5301 Leetsdale Ave. opened in June 2014.
The bakery’s specialty confections, which include doughnuts topped with bacon, fresh peaches and sugar that is hand-caramelized with a small blowtorch, are also sold at Pablo’s, Aviano and Kaladi coffee shops in Denver, according to a press release.
Josh Schwab, owner and culinary mastermind behind all of the treats served at Glazed and Confuzed, founded the sugary enterprise in 2012 following several stints as a sous chef at a slew of prominent West Coast eateries.
A native of Los Angeles, Calif., Schwab said the decision to jump into an increasingly crowded specialty doughnut market — joining the likes of the wildly popular, Portland, Ore.-based Voodoo Doughnuts — stemmed from a passion for baking and a lifelong love for circular cakes coated with saccharine glaze. His grandfather would regularly bring a dozen doughnuts to family dinners on Sunday nights throughout his childhood.
“We started at the Littleton farmers market and it just snowballed,” Schwab said. “I just liked the whole concept of taking a doughnut and changing it up a bit…so here I am.”
Despite the recent proliferation of gourmet doughnut spots across the Denver metro region, including Voodoo, The Fractured Prune and Habit Doughnut Dispensary, Jorge De La Torre, dean of culinary education at Johnson & Wales University in Denver, said that the demand for high quality sweet treats remains high.
“People are not as afraid of carbs anymore, so people are enjoying (doughnuts) again,” De La Torre said. “Even 10 years ago there was a huge lack of doughnuts in Denver — there was Lamar’s and Winchell’s and that was about it. Now there’s a lot of them … and I still think that we’re riding the ‘It’s ok to eat breads and carbs’ ride.”
Glazed and Confuzed’s new Aurora outpost will sit in a roughly 500-square-foot footprint and will not house any baking equipment onsite. Instead, Glazed employees will shuttle over enough doughnuts to fill a medium-sized display case each morning, according to Schwab. The new shop will open early and serve doughnuts, coffee and espresso until the day’s supply of treats is exhausted.
“We’ll pretty much have all the same flavors of everything, just a smaller version of what we have now,” Schwab said.
Stanley’s lineup of celebrated Denver businesses — including Denver Biscuit Company, Rosenberg’s Bagels and Infinite Monkey Theorem — is what encouraged Schwab to stake his new claim in Aurora. He said that he turned down an offer to join a similar concept, The Central Market in Denver, two years ago because “the timing wasn’t right.”
“I started to see the restaurants that were going in (to Stanley) and I really liked that list,” Schwab said. “We’re really big fans of Rosenberg’s Bagels and Denver Biscuit Company, so that definitely influenced us.”
Schwab said that he’s excited to tap into the expected heavy flow of foot traffic at Stanley, as pedestrians have been a virtually nonexistent phenomenon at the Leetsdale location.
“The one bad thing about when we took (the Leetsdale location) is that it had no foot traffic,” Schwab said. “So that’s just going to add an amazing amount of foot traffic for us.”
Slated to house more than 50 businesses ranging from florists to yoga studios to beer gardens, the 100,000-square-foot Stanley Marketplace is expected to slowly open over the course of the fall, according to a July 27 newsletter. Schwab has not yet identified an official date for opening his second location.