Apple Cider Doughnuts

I'd been dying to make apple cider doughnuts for at least the past month. I'd seen dozens of different recipes fly by on foodgawker and last weekend I finally felt like I had the time to try it out. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited to eat some delicious, fresh, apple cider doughnuts.

Let me tell you - I think I am giving up on my frying attempts. For starters, I hate frying things because pouring an entire bottle of vegetable oil into a pan makes me feel kind of gross and also sad, and secondly hot oil scares me. A lot. But the real reason I think I am giving up on frying things is I just don't think the results are worth the effort (and calories).

Now I'm not faulting the recipe I used - I think my biggest problem is I don't have a great thermometer and the oil may not have been quite hot enough. I also read that most doughnut shops fry in hydrogenated oil (not that I really want to do that either though) - but supposedly it actually keeps less of the oil from seeping into your food. I wonder what using coconut oil would be like - I did a little bit of reading and it sounds like you can use it for frying, but I suppose that would also be expensive!

Anyway, I think I am going to buy myself a doughnut pan so that next time I feel like trying to make doughnuts I can just make the baked kind! The good news was, the dough by itself was pretty delicious! If you're interested here is the recipe I used: Apple Cider Doughnuts.

The only changes I made were to use 1/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour instead of the graham flour and I used flax seed eggs instead of the real eggs (1 Tbs. ground flax seeds mixed with 3 Tbs. warm water = 1 egg). Perhaps you will have better luck than I did!  (Side note: I think if I had made only doughnut holes they might have turned out ok, the grease seemed to seep into those less).

-C

Saturday Morning Doughnuts

Way back when I first started following The Pioneer Woman's website her recipe for homemade glazed doughnuts caught my eye. I bookmarked it and then moved on since I didn't own a metal slotted spoon and had zero experience making anything that required yeast. Then for the past couple of weeks the recipe has been featured on the front page of her website and it has been taunting me. Seriously. I thought about doughnuts all week long. I haven't had a doughnut in ages, not since Stephanie and I went to that vegan doughnut shop in Las Vegas back in September.

I decided this would be one of my projects for the weekend. I made the dough last night - all looked well. I took it out of the refrigerator this morning and rolled it out and still - all looked well. Even after I cut the doughnuts out using a biscuit cutter and a shot glass (side note: I used a Corona shot glass that my sister got me for my 21st birthday - why does Corona make shot glasses? Anyone?) they still looked like they were supposed to.

Then I went to let them rise using my standard bread trick of heating the oven up to the lowest possible temperature and then turning it off. I have to do this because we keep the house at basically a freezing temperature. Ok maybe it's more like 63 degrees. It's still pretty cold though if you ask me, and too cold to let things rise properly. Unfortunately this is where things went terribly wrong. Here are my doughnuts after an hour of "rising":

Sad, sad flat doughnuts. Luckily I had left a few doughnut holes in a pan on top of the oven that seemed to rise correctly.

 I did try to fry a couple of the sad flat ones just to see if maybe they were salvageable. They weren't really. But the doughnut holes worked out alright! Here are the glazed results:

And here is the difference between the flattened greasy doughnut, and the doughnut hole that actually rose properly:

You want to know the worst part? Doughnuts aren't even as good as I had built them up to be in my head. The only reason I kind of want to make them again is because I'm mad that I messed them up. I'm considering it - I suppose I could bring them in to work on Monday, but I don't know. It's kind of a lot of work to prove to myself I really can make them correctly. Maybe I should just go back to baking.

Hopefully I have better results to share with you from tomorrow's Sunday Dinner!

-C