Magnolia Bakery Debuts Limited-Time Apple Cider Donut Pudding In Chicago

For food lovers who don't live in Chicago, it's easy to be jealous of one of America's best culinary cities. Now that Magnolia Bakery has unveiled its new Windy City-exclusive pudding, we're even more envious. Magnolia Bakery is normally synonymous with New York, with eight locations in the Big Apple but only one in Chi-Town. However, Magnolia is tossing the Midwest a bone this time around by partnering with Stan's Donuts & Coffee in Chicago. Stan's itself is a bit of a transplant to Illinois as it was initially created in partnership with Stan Berman of the iconic Stan's Donuts in Los Angeles back in 2014. After Berman retired and the original L.A. location closed in 2020, Chicago became the brand's new home.

Magnolia Bakery is most beloved for its pudding, with its banana pudding in particular being iconic enough to get recipe write-ups in places like the New York Times. The famous East Coast bakery and West Coast donut shop are nowblessing Chicago with a pudding creation built around Stan's apple cider donuts.

The apple cider donut pudding will be available exclusively at its Chicago location and will only be on sale for a limited time from October 16 to October 30. That same window will also see a different limited-time collaboration between the two companies available at all Stan's locations: An apple pudding version of its Le Stan croissant donut, which we named one of the best donuts in the U.S.

The Stan's apple cider donuts that the new pudding is based on are so popular that they are sold not just as Stan's but also grocery stores around the area. In addition to the standard apple-spiced cake and cinnamon sugar coating, they also have a liquid cinnamon glaze drizzled over each donut. The new Magnolia Bakery pudding mashes up those donuts with cinnamon crumb topping, apple pie filling, and vanilla wafers while Magnolia's classic vanilla pudding serves as the base. The Apple Pudding Le Stan will feature the normal croissant donut tossed with cinnamon sugar and filled with Magnolia's Apple Cider pudding-inspired pastry cream, which will also be drizzled on top.

This apple cider donut collab is actually the second pudding concoction that Magnolia and Stan's have created together. In 2022, the brands partnered up to release a Banana Pudding Bismark at Stan's, which was a donut filled with pastry cream, mashed bananas, and crushed vanilla wafers. The food world may be filled with collaborations and crossovers right now but, given the quality and pedigree of these companies, we can only hope they continue to work together and that more than one city gets to enjoy their creations in the future.