680 Lansing RoadI’ve gone to Lansing quite a bit the last few weeks and we have a few more trips that way coming up.
Charlotte has become my go-to stop for gas, a snack and a bathroom. I like the easy access right off the highway to both a Speedway and a Mobil station.
That isn’t just any Mobil station though. That Mobil station is a Quality Dairy location and if you’ve spent anytime at all in the Lansing area, you know what a treat that can be.
Quality Dairy’s Charlotte location is on Lansing Road right off the I-69 interchange on the south side of the road as you’re heading in to Charlotte. The large building is not only a Mobil gas station but a full Quality Dairy convenience store and a laundromat. We’ve been stopping at this QD for years. It was a pit stop when we lived in Lansing as we headed back to Chicago for the weekend and it’s a pit stop now when we need to go to Lansing. I needed gas and a bathroom before I got to my job site in Lansing so I pulled off the highway….but there was another reason I chose QD over the Speedway this time.
This Quality Dairy is pretty large compared to the stand alone convenience stores peppered throughout the Lansing Metro area. The cash registers are right in the middle of the store and the grocery and snack areas are on either side.
The middle of the store has a kitchen area where they heat up sandwiches and fried food alongside Nobel Roman’s Pizza. There’s also an ice cream counter here for the summer months.
I’ve grabbed sandwiches from Quality Dairy before and they’re really not that good. Speedway is right across the street and if you’re going to grab gas station sandwiches, theirs are much better. Ditto on the pizza.
The thing that you go to Quality Dairy for is the bakery items. Their donuts are the best in the area and each location has huge self-service display cases with dozens and dozens of donuts.
But regular donuts aren’t actually the reason I made a QD stop on this day. I was there for the paczki.
J and I lived in Lansing for about a year and a half and we stopped at Quality Dairy pretty frequently. Those trips obviously stopped when we moved to Kalamazoo and outside of this one in Charlotte, I’m not sure if I’ve been to one in the 15 years since we’ve moved.
We were about a week away from Fat Tuesday when I had to make this trip so I thought I’d do something special for J and the kids…..and myself of course. I grabbed a half dozen paczki and a couple bottles of Pepsi. The cost for the six sweets was right around $10.
I guess I grew up pretty sheltered because before I started dating J, I had never heard of paczki. They’re huge in Chicago’s Polish neighborhoods but I grew up far enough away from the city that it was never a thing. J and her mom have their favorite bakery in Chicago where they got fresh strawberry paczki from every year. They’ve never found anything like it outside of that one bakery but we all still try to get paczki from somewhere every year.
I couldn’t remember if or what kind of fruit paczki J liked so I went safe and just got all cream ones. I knew the kids would like those and I knew I would like those. Turns out, that was the right call. J told me later she likes strawberry but only those fresh strawberry ones. The strawberry jam isn’t as good.
I grabbed two of the vanilla cream because those are the kind I like and I knew they were a safe enough pick that everyone else would like them too. They’re powdered sugar covered donuts filled with vanilla cream. I cut one in half as soon as I got home and by the time I woke up the next morning, the other 3/4 were gone.
I also grabbed a chocolate cream, also covered in powdered sugar, just in case someone wanted chocolate.
And of course, I had to grab a custard. This one was a glazed donut with custard inside.
There was one that was called “Death by Chocolate” which also the chocolate cream. The donut itself was dipped in chocolate to make it extra chocolatey.
The last one was also a vanilla cream but this one was covered in cinnamon sugar.
As you can imagine, these didn’t last long. As soon as B got up in the morning, he came in to my room and asked what the donuts on the counter were for. I told him he could have one and I think he had at least one. By the time I got home from work the next night, there was only half of one left and the kids were asking if we could get more.
Quality Dairy is a Lansing institution. You won’t find any Lansingite who won’t have stories to tell you about the place. The bakery is the reason for outsiders to seek out a QD but they provide such valuable resources to the neighborhoods they’re in.