Baked Powdered Sugar Donuts

Holy cow, it is June 1st! 

The last few months have really flown by, and now I'm just a few weeks away from graduating and packing my bags to head back north. I have to say, I was skeptical when I moved here, but Southern California has really treated me well. There is something to be said for the impact that sunny day after sunny day can have on your overall mood.

I haven't blogged for several months, but I have baked a few times since my last post. I wasn't so happy with the results of my last few projects, so I didn't feel like sharing those recipes. I get discouraged when recipes don't turn out well, but I think I need to change my mindset. Sometimes you'll get it right, and sometimes things will just flop. Luckily, baking is one of the very few things in life where you can simply throw away the mistakes and move on, no hard feelings whatsoever.

I woke up this morning with a hankering, and I've been wanting to try this recipe for baked donuts that I saw on... YouTube! I've been wasting tons of time on YouTube lately, mostly watching tutorials. I came across this video on baked donuts over a week ago, and have had the tab open on my computer since then, so I would remember to try making them. I finally got to it this morning, and I was really happy with the results. Really, really happy.

I've tried making baked donuts several times now, and I think these are my favorites so far. The outside was *just* crispy, and the inside was dense enough to remind me of a real, deep-fried cake donut. Sigh. Those are the best. Anyway, here's the recipe.

Baked Powdered Sugar Donuts
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp baking powder
1 whole egg

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
Pinch of salt1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup powdered sugar (to coat doughnuts)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream butter and sugar on low speed. Add vanilla, egg and baking powder. Mix until thoroughly combined. Turn off mixer and add flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing each addition completely. Add salt and milk, mix to combine. 

Using a piping bag, fill donut pan with batter. Bake for 13 minutes. 

Cool donuts in the pan, then turn upside down to remove donuts. Cool completely, then coat in powdered sugar.

Chocolate glazed chocolate donuts

I have another double-header post coming up this weekend (assuming I don't get bored, distracted or just plain lazy about blogging), so I'll try to keep this one short. (By the way, I have been playing around with the layout of this blog, and made it just a tad wider to accommodate larger pictures. I hope they make you drool just a little bit more!)


One of the reasons I haven't baked (and consequently, blogged) as much this quarter is that my learning team hasn't been meeting as frequently as we did during Fall Quarter. I try not to bake for myself, because then I end up eating the whole batch myself, which isn't very good for me. However, last weekend, my section had a BBQ on Saturday, so I decided it was time to make some donuts... Baked ones, of course.


I found a recipe by searching on Pinterest for the most delicious looking baked chocolate donuts I could find, and eventually settled on a recipe from a blog called The Milkman's Wife. 


As an aside, have I mentioned that Pinterest is my new favorite way to both discover new recipes and keep track of things I want to try making? I've tried various recipe organization tools over the years, from old-fashioned paper print outs, to Google Docs to Springpad, but none of them really stuck. These other options were either too time consuming, too difficult to organize, or too far outside my daily routine to be efficient or effective. By contrast, I'm really loving Pinterest, because I can browse the Food & Drink section to get new ideas, but I can also pin recipes from across the web (using my handy dandy Google Chrome extension!), all to one board.


Okay, enough geeking out. Let's get baking already!


I'm going to be honest -- these baked donuts are not as dense as real cake donuts (which I love). They're closer to a cupcake in the shape of a donut. But they're still tasty, and they look delectable with a coat of shiny, smooth chocolate glaze. At first, I was disappointed that I didn't have time to get colored sprinkles to make these a bit more festive, but after I started glazing them, I decided that they looked pretty just with the glaze. What do you think?

By the way, this recipe is SUPER fast and easy -- another plus in my book! Here's the recipe, which I found on The Milkman's Wife.


INGREDIENTS
3/4 cup flour 
1/4 cup dutch-process cocoa 
1/2 cup sugar 
1 tablespoon baking powder 
1/4 teaspoon salt 
1 egg 
1/2 cup milk 
1 teaspoon vanilla 
4 tablespoons canola oil 
Colored or chocolate sprinkles (optional) 



1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips 
2 tablespoons butter 
1 tablespoon corn syrup 
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract 



DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees and coat a donut pan liberally with cooking spray. 
Stir together flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large bowl. Add the egg, vanilla, and milk and stir together for 1 minute. Add the oil and continue to whisk until just combined. 


Transfer the batter to a large measuring cup (or a bowl with a spout) for easy pouring. Fill each cavity in the pan 2/3 of the way full with batter. 


Bake for 7 to 9 minutes or until the donuts spring back when lightly touched. Cool completely before icing. 


While the donuts are baking, prepare the chocolate glaze. Combine the chocolate chips, butter, corn syrup and vanilla extract in a double boiler (or in a stainless steel or glass bowl over some simmering water). Stir until the chocolate is melted and everything is incorporated. Use immediately.

Chocolate chip donuts: out of the fryer, into the oven

Hey kids, it's story time!

Back in elementary school, I went to after-school daycare at the local Jewish Community Center. I'm not Jewish, so I don't know how Mom decided this would be the best place for me to spend my afternoons -- I suspect it had something to do with the Center's proximity to our house, the prevalence of Challah bread, or my last name, but I cannot say with certainty. 

I liked the JCC well enough, but one thing I found very odd was that I seemed to be the only kid from my elementary school (literally, the only one) who went there.  I felt this most acutely in kindergarten, when my school was the first stop on the JCC bus route and every day I rode an enormous school bus with just one other person: the driver. This turned out to be rather fortuitous, though, because the bus driver also worked at a donut shop and sometimes brought leftovers for us kids. As the lone rider, I always got to pick first from the vast array. (As an aside, I ended up becoming friends with my driver, to the point where he gave me a pack of crayons for Christmas and I drew him a thank you card. I wonder what happened to him...)

All of this is just a long way of saying that while I wouldn't call myself a donut fanatic, and I very rarely crave donuts, I still feel like a kid when ever I go into a donut shop and get to pick whatever kind I want. And, of course, there are times when donuts can be truly and utterly divine.

I much prefer dense donuts to regular ones -- chocolate old fashions are my donut Achilles' heels (I also like blueberry cake ones, which I know is really weird, but I think it's because I just like anything with blueberries) -- so this year for Christmas, I asked for a donut pan. 

I've always been intrigued by the idea of baking donuts instead of frying them, and I've seen recipes for baked donuts floating around over the years, so the concept has been in the back of my mind for a while. When I got back to LA, a recipe for baked donuts popped up on the King Arthur Flour company blog, so it seemed the time had come to break in the new pan.

As usual, I did not follow the recipe to a T. I didn't have nutmeg, so instead I used pumpkin pie spice -- I think it still tasted good, but I guess purists might beg to differ. Additionally, I don't usually keep milk on hand because I'm lactose intolerant; I ended up using soy milk, which is a frequent substitution for me. Finally, I only had regular sized chips, and that seemed too big for the donut proportions, so I chopped up the chips into smaller bits. I also sprinkled a little bit of chocolate in the bottom of each donut mold, which tasted good but didn't turn out to be as visually appealing as I'd pictured in my head.

Here's the final product:

Verdict: I'm going to call a spade a spade on this one -- baked is not the same as fried, but you know what? They were pretty tasty nonetheless. These ones puffed up nicely, so they LOOKED like donuts at the very least, and they were not too hard or dry, which seemed like the biggest potential pitfall in my book. The texture is not quite as dense and crumbly as a cake donut, but not quite as fluffy as a real cake. One of my classmates compared it to coffee cake, which I interpret as a positive feedback. 

And the final test: will I make these again? I think so! I'm looking forward to trying other variations though -- maybe with blueberries. ;)

Here is the recipe, adapted from King Arthur Flour Company's blog (I actually made a half-recipe for 6 donuts, but here are the proportions for a whole dozen):

Ingredients
1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) butter
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 2/3 cups AP flour
1 cup soy milk
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips, chopped into bits

Directions
1) Preheat the oven to 425°F. Lightly grease two standard donut pans.

2) In a medium-sized mixing bowl, beat together the butter, vegetable oil, and sugars until smooth.

3) Add the eggs, beating to combine.

4) Stir in the baking powder, baking soda, spices, salt, and vanilla.

5) Stir the flour into the butter mixture alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with the flour and making sure everything is thoroughly combined.

6) Sprinkle some chocolate chip bits into each donut pan, and stir the remaining chopped up chocolate chips into the batter

8) Spoon 1/2 the batter into a lightly greased doughnut pans, filling the wells to the rim for chocolate chip doughnuts.

9) Bake the doughnuts for 10 minutes. Remove them from the oven, and wait 5 to 7 minutes before turning them out of the pans onto a rack. Repeat chocolate sprinkles and baking process for second 1/2 dozen. Enjoy warm; or cool completely, and store airtight.