Purple Dough

Ube is a purple yam, and in Filipino kitchens it is less a flavor than a color with a sweet, nutty, vanilla-ish depth. This Filipino-American dessert shop, a few blocks north of the Roosevelt Avenue strip, has made it the whole point. Everything in the case is some shade of violet, and the shop moved a while back into a roomier space on 39th Avenue with more places to sit.

The doughnuts are baked cake doughnuts rather than fried — ube, calamansi, coconut pandan — and there are ube cannoli, ube crinkle cookies, ube silvanas, an ube leche flan and an ice-cream-cake doughnut sandwich. In summer the order is halo-halo, the shaved-ice sundae of sweet beans, jellies, leche flan and ube; any time, an ube latte or a fruit shake.