Homemade Doughnuts

We have a new Sunday morning breakfast tradition, and it is just delicious (and not as unhealthy as you might think).

 

 

Homemade doughnuts!

I received this amazing little gizmo for my birthday from my friend Mel. Is it not so cute? It has sprinkles on it!

This makes 5 small doughnuts at a time in just 10-12 minutes. Because the doughnuts are baked and not fried, the calories are lightened somewhat, but the taste is not, as long as you follow my directions:

1. Take that little recipe booklet that comes with your machine.

2. THROW. IT. AWAY.

3. Buy yourself a delicious doughnut recipe book or hit the baking blogs. This is the recipe book I have and the baked cake doughnut recipe is phenomenal. SO delicious.

4. Ditch the 'confectioners sugar + milk' glaze recipe and make this instead (I use less than half of this for 10 doughnuts):

The best glaze in the world
(I believe this is from the 1976 Betty Crocker Cookbook)

1/3 c butter
2 cups confectioners sugar
1 1/2 t vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
2-4 T hot water

Melt butter in a saucepan, remove from heat. Add sugar and vanilla extract and whisk together. Add water 1 T at a time until the glaze reaches the desired consistency.

Use this on cookies and cakes as well. Trust me.

You'll thank me.

I used the chocolate glaze recipe from the cookbook above, and it was pretty great. When the glaze has some cocoa in it, it doesn't taste overly-sugary like the plain 'milk + sugar' glazes.

I feel uncomfortable posting a recipe from a cookbook that is not posted elsewhere online, so I surfed around and dug up some baked cake doughnut recipes to try. I can't vouch for them, but they sound pretty great:

Fluffy Cake Doughnuts

Baked Cake Doughnuts (The use of cake flour in this one indicates that it might be quite promising - it's very similar to the recipe I used)

Baked Cake Batter Doughnuts (actually uses box mix, could be interesting - I'll be trying this next!)

If you don't have a machine, you can also buy doughnut pans for use in the oven or you can totally cheat and make them in muffin tins. I love the machine because it's convenient, easy, cooks evenly, and doesn't heat up the house.

Yum.