Not that doughnuts aren’t worth celebrating on their own right, but as it turns out, there’s a little more to this holiday than that. The first US National Doughnut Day was celebrated in 1938, by the Salvation Army, as a way to honor the women who served doughnuts to soldiers and to raise money to help those in dire circumstances at home during the Great Depression. According to Wikipedia (and, of course if it is on a wiki, it must be true… right, right?):

“About 250 Salvation Army volunteers went to France. Because of the difficulties of providing freshly baked goods from huts established in abandoned buildings near to the front lines, two Salvation Army volunteers (Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purvian) came up with the idea of providing doughnuts. These are reported to have been an “instant hit”, and “soon many soldiers were visiting Salvation Army huts”. Margaret Sheldon wrote of one busy day “Today I made 22 pies, 300 doughnuts, 700 cups of coffee.”

Well, that seems worth celebrating. How about some Fresh Cherry Cake Drop Doughnuts?

To make your own, simply follow a basic cake doughnut recipe (like the Basic Cake doughnut recipe in Doughnuts), and mix about 10 pitted and chopped fresh cherries into the dry flour mixture before adding the butter, the proceed as normal with the rest of the recipe. For the light pink glaze, I simply squeezed some juice from a handful of cherries and used it in place of the liquid in the standard glaze recipe. A teensy pinch of salt will help bring out the cherry flavor in the glaze.

]]> http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/06/03/fresh-cherry-cake-doughnuts/feed/ 22 http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/05/20/baked-strawberry-doughnut-holes/ http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/05/20/baked-strawberry-doughnut-holes/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 18:09:20 +0000 L http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/05/20/baked-strawberry-doughnut-holes/ Almost Strawberry Baked Doughnut Holes. On a Stick.

Developing recipes is full of almosts. You get an idea in your head, and you give it a try, and it almost works. Maybe not quite what you were imagining, but close. Or, sometimes not even all that close. You try again, and again, and with a little luck and patience and effort, you can get there.

When I was writing Doughnuts and developing my baked cake doughnut recipe, there was one little thing that I never quite got. The baked doughnuts bake up in a doughnut pan, that is doughnut shaped. No holes. Now, if you were a kid growing up with Dunkin Donuts Munchkins, you know that the holes are the very best part. I tried mini muffin pans. They were almost right. The taste was fine, but they weren’t round.

Last week, while looking for popsicle molds*, I stumbled across these little silicone half spheres. Genius! The perfect baked doughnut hole pan! The tops would puff up to a nice round, and the bottoms would be round too. I one-clicked away.

Today, I gave my brilliant find a shot, with strawberry baked doughnut batter. And they worked. Almost. See, the thing about cake doughnuts is you want them to be just the right amount of dense. Too light and fluffy, and you just have a cupcake. So, they puffed, but not to the perfect sphere I had imagines. No, really, they didn’t puff up much at all. I got lovely little half spheres. Perhaps a little tweak to the recipe will get a better puff, but they were really delicious as they were. Just not quite the right shape, once again.

But then I had another thought. I have a tray full of perfect little 1/2 spheres. Why not fill them and make them a whole! So, a little strawberry “kreme” later, and a little fun with sticks (because everything is more fun On a Stick! Cheers for Matt and his beautiful book!), and I have almost baked doughnut holes once again.

To make the strawberry baked doughnuts, just follow the standard baked doughnut recipe but toss in chopped strawberries into the flour/butter mixture before you add the wet ingredients. Use about 1 strawberry for every 3 doughnut holes.

Strawberry Doughnut Kreme

There is no cream in Kreme… leave out the strawberry and you have a pretty good approximation of Oreo “stuff” with this recipe…

You can make your own Strawberry syrup (strawberries, sugar, heat, time), but I used Schuh Farm’s Strawberry Syrup which is mighty fine.

1 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons butter or softened coconut oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 to 5 teaspoons Strawberry syrup, to desired thickness

Mix the powdered sugar, butter and vanilla until smooth. Drizzle in the strawberry syrup, a little at a time, until you get the flavor/consistency and color you want.

*If anyone knows where to find aluminum kulfi molds online, let me know! They are perfect for an upcoming shoot, but I haven’t been able to find any online anywhere that would ship to the US.

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You get the texture of a tea cake and the flavor of a doughnut. Drizzle with doughnut glaze and slather on some rhubarb orange compote. The perfect weekend treat.

Ever since I started telling people that I was going to write a cookbook on doughnuts, I’ve gotten questions about whether it was going to include any savory recipes. Like me, many of you out there love your doughnuts, but also tend to crave salty over sweet. I’ve been promising some savory doughnut recipes ever since, and I must say, I wish I had gotten around to it much, much sooner.

Since I basically started my whole doughnut obsession around Cinco de Mayo with margarita doughnuts, what better way to jump into savory doughnuts than this: green chile and chicken doughnuts! Oh, sure, it’s more of a New Mexican flavor combination than a true Mexican one, but then again, it seems that it is the US that has turned the 5th of May into a new reason to party. And really, can you ever go wrong with green chile?

You can do these doughnuts a couple of ways. If you want easy, just make raised doughnuts as usual (either with  one of the recipes in Doughnuts or one of the ones on the site), but use 1/2 of the sugar and twice the salt. I subbed in 25% whole wheat flour in these, and loved it. Cut them out as doughnuts (they’ll just fry easier that way!) And then, load up a couple with warmed up green chile with shredded chicken, a little diced onion, maybe some cilantro, definitely a fried egg, a sprinkle of cojita, and a good dollop of sour cream. Oh my. Breakfast fit for a Donut King.

Or, you can get fancy. And by fancy I mean stuffed. Roll out your dough a bit thinner than normal and cut out rounds (without holes), and then place a bit of the shredded chicken, green chile, cojita, onion and whatever else you like in the center. Be careful not to overfill though… you want it to be less than 2 tablespoons all in. Then, top with another round, and crimp closed (I use the same cutter, which trims off any extra and pinches the edges together well). Proof, fry and you have what I will call with no shame an Empanut. Sort of like a doughnut, sort of like an empanada, all kinds of delicious. You could, of course, then proceed as above and smother in more green chile and cojita. Or, you can simply take a bite.

Or, if you really want to get crazy… cut out a ton of holes, fry them up, and use them in place of the chips in your favorite chilaqueles recipe.

Oh savory doughnuts… what in the world took me so long!

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!

So one morning I woke up and thought, “Hey, how about a class where we make doughnuts and take pictures of them? What could be better than that?”

And, what do you know. Here it is!

Join me as I demystify making doughnuts with my family’s favorite: Crullers, those beautifully twisted fried treats.

The class will be held on Saturday, April 23rd from 12-4pm and then again on Monday, April 25th from 12-4pm (for those who can’t make a weekend class) at Spare Room. Class size is limited to 6 people, so don’t wait too long to sign up!

This class starts out with an interactive demonstration of how to make 2 different types of crullers… hearty cake doughnut crullers and the heavenly, airy and just a little bit eggy bites of bliss otherwise known as French crullers (or honey crullers for those Tim Horton’s fans out there). You’ll also learn my fool-proof, no measure technique for making glaze which is yummy on all sorts of things.

Then, between nibbles, we’ll pull out our cameras to learn and practice the basics of food styling and natural light photography. And try not to get our cameras too sticky.

The class also happens to include a copy of Doughnuts: Simple and Delicious Recipes to Make at Home and a few tools to help make crullers, so you can go home and tempt your friends and neighbors with your own homemade treats.

You can sign up here:

Saturday’s Crullers & Cameras (sold out)

Monday’s Crullers & Cameras

Don’t forget to bring your cameras and your sweet tooth!

I’d love to go back some year and really experience it, minus near delirium. But, this year, I’m more than satisfied with this big ole plate of beignets and chocolate chicory coffee fudge sauce.

There are many different beignet recipes, some using yeast, but I prefer making them from the same pate a choux batter as the French Crullers in my book. They are much quicker to make than any yeasted dough and insanely light. Once you get the feel for how the egg gets incorporated, they are also very, very easy. Plus, if you don’t want to fry, they bake beautifully.

Of course, baked they are more akin to profiteroles than beignets, but I say to-may-to/to-mah-to. If you glaze them immediately, the “crust” you get from baking will be minimize. If you are using the recipe in the book, just pipe little rounds of about a heaping tablespoon, pushing down any little peaks with a moist finger. Since they are small, you’ll want to bake them for less time.

If you don’t have the book (why not!), this zeppole recipe is quite similar. For the sauce, I tweaked the Chocolate Fudge Sauce in this gorgeous Chocolate book.

Hope you have a wonderfully indulgent Mardi Gras!

It seems that I can never quite be done with a recipe. A recent reader comment prompted me to dig deeper into why homemade doughnuts go stale so quickly, when the commercial variety can hang out at least for a day, if not more without becoming tough. My immediate thought: chemicals. Who knows what sorts of preservatives you can find going into the doughnuts of the big chain stores. Who knows? Well, in fact, you can know quite easily. It only took about 20 seconds for me to get the full list of ingredients in a Dunkin Donuts plain glazed. (I think it’s great that they do this, btw):

Enriched Unbleached Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron as Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamin Mononitrate, Enzyme, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Palm Oil, Water, Dextrose, Soybean Oil, Whey (a milk derivative), Skim Milk, Yeast, Contains less than 2% of the following: Salt, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda), Defatted Soy Flour, Wheat Starch, Mono and Diglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Cellulose Gum, Soy Lecithin, Guar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Artificial Flavor, Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative), Enzyme, Colored with (Turmeric and Annatto Extracts, Beta Carotene), Eggs;

Yep, there they are. Those gums and preservatives. How can a home cook compete with that in terms of staying power? And yet, who wants to eat that?

Well, look a bit closer, and you’ll see another sneaky ingredient in there: soy flour. When I was researching gluten free varieties of doughnuts, I did a small amount of reading on soy flour in doughnuts. I was focused more on recreating the doughnuts without any wheat, so it hadn’t occurred to me that a bit of soy flour might in fact improve a traditional doughnut. Now, as I started looking more into what commercial producers use, I find that they almost all use some soy flour! Soy flour, it seems, reduces the oil absorption when frying and helps maintain moisture in the finished pastry. It also adds protein, which increases the nutritional value of the doughnuts. (still not exactly health food). If it does these things for the industrial doughnut, why not try it for the home one?

To try this, add 5 to 8 grams (a little less than 2 tablespoons) of soy flour (I used Bob’s Red Mill) along with the 300-400g of bread flour in the recipe*. It’s best to sift it in with the bread flour to break up any lumps and distribute it evenly, then proceed as normal. Once all the ingredients were in, I gave it a little taste test. The raw dough tasted beany to me. I happen to have a bit of a fear of bean flours of any variety. That beany taste just ruins most things for me. I don’t want it anywhere near my doughnuts. I was quite convinced I had completely ruined the batch. But, I kept with it, hoping that somehow, magically, it would vanish in the final product. The dough worked as it usually does… a soft, moist dough that handles better when chilled. It puffed beautifully during proofing, and fried up to gorgeous rings and holes. They looked perfect. In fact, they might have even looked a bit better than perfect. And, the oil? I didn’t measure, but I would swear there was more left in the pot than normal.

The big test was ahead: Did I just make icky bean flavored doughnuts? Or would they pass my taste test.

Oh, my. No bean to be found. The doughnuts are light and fluffy, with just the right spring. It’s been an hour so far, and they are still unbelievably good. Definitely less oily, which seems to be keeping the glaze that perfect set. Of course, they have to last another few hours for the true test. I’ll report back!

Update: An hour later – and the pastry is still soft. I covered them, lightly, with foil… and that seemed to perhaps trap in a bit too much moisture, so the basic glaze softened. The chocolate glaze, however, still looks great. Uncovering to see how they hold up that way.

Update: For last night’s late night snack, Cam and I munched down a couple. They weren’t the ethereal bites they were for the first hour, but they were still quite soft. The couple I had very gingerly wrapped in foil were slightly more moist. All still very edible. I left the remaining doughnuts laying on a baking tray with a light foil cover. This morning, they were pretty stale… not rocks, and definitely a bit softer than they have been in the past, but definitely had that day old feel.

Final Thoughts: Adding the soy made a small difference in the overall staying quality of the dough, but it isn’t a magic bullet. The bigger win probably comes from the doughnuts absorbing less oil when frying, which makes for a nicer overall pastry. While I still need to do some experimenting with the best way to store the doughnuts, particularly overnight, this is a trick worth trying!

*I used the original Basic Raised recipe from my book… but you can also try with my Raised Variation 2.0.

Today, I started simply. I substituted whole wheat pastry flour for 50% (by weight) of the all purpose flour in my Chai cake doughnut recipe (“Doughnuts”) topped with a honey glaze. Wow. The whole wheat pastry flour adds a lovely nutty flavor, but the doughnuts are still light and fluffy with a subtle and pleasing crispness to the crust. I’m quite sure you could make the same recipe with 100% whole wheat pastry flour for even more wheaty flavor.

Next I’ll be trying whole wheat raised doughnuts, buckwheat cake doughnuts and maybe something really crazy like chocolate pumpernickel!

What is your favorite whole grain to bake with?

How cute are Doughnut Snowmen? I made little hats from this Martha Stewart meringue recipe, but a little piping of chocolate ganache would make a great hat too.

To make these, just make the holes only from any dough recipe (if you are making my cake doughnut recipe, just drop in spoonfuls, and they should come out round enough). I used my basic raised dough recipe, but any flavor would be great. Given it’s the holidays, maybe try it with the eggnog doughnut recipe in the book! You can make the holes all the same size, or some bigger and some smaller. You can even make snowmen using a full doughnut as the base, and then topping it with two doughnuts! Just dust whatever doughnut you are making generously with powdered sugar. You might also need to use a skewer to hold them together, although I didn’t with the raised doughnut holes I made.

Or, how about Doughnut “Candy Cane” Twists.

These take just a bit more work, but it’s a technique that works great year round to create flavored twists. You make these with a basic raised dough, but work a very small amount of red gel food coloring (it’s important to use the gel food coloring for this… regular liquid won’t work) into about 1/2 the dough once it’s gone through its cold proof, but before you cut anything out. On a lightly floured surface, roll out each 1/2 into a rectangle a little less than a 1/2 inch thick and 3 to 4 inches wide. Then cut into strips that are 3/4 inch thick (and 3-4 inches wide). Take one strip of each dough… a plain and a red… and connect the ends to form a long strip.

With one hand on one end and the other on the other side start rolling, pushing one hand forward and the other back. The strip should start to twist. Keep twisting the strip until the whole thing is quite twisty. Then pick up the ends and quickly bring your hands together. The strip should twist itself together (if not, no worries, you can do the twisting manually). Pinch the end together and place the twist on a lightly floured, non-terry baking cloth on top of a sheet pan. Repeat with the remaining dough, and then cover the twists to proof, and fry in 360F oil, turning the twists over twice.

Lightly dust the rectangles with caster sugar, cinnamon sugar or a citrus sugar once they cool slightly.

If you’ve been trying to track down a copy of Doughnuts as a gift for Christmas, sorry it has taken so long! My publishers have told me that the 2nd printing has arrived and is now working its way out to stores, so it should be any moment now…

Happy Holidays everyone!

These drop doughnuts (or fritters if you prefer) use my basic cake doughnut recipe from the book, with just a few little tweaks. First, I add all sorts of spices. I like nutmeg, ginger, cardamom and cinnamon. Just a healthy pinch of each works great. Allspice, mace and even cloves would be nice too. These just get mixed into the flour.

Then, because the squash puree is quite moist, the wet ingredients need to be reduced a bit. I recommend leaving the milk out all together and adding 1/2 cup of the pureed squash, mixed in with the egg, yogurt and vanilla. Add these wet ingredients to the flour mixture as instructed. Once everything is all mixed up, check the thickness. The batter should be pretty thick, but not as thick as cookie dough. If it is stiff, you can then add a bit of milk… maybe a tablespoon… to thin it out some. Then fry as drop fritters!

While I’m talking about frying, I had a great question from a reader this week about how to get nice round drop fritters. First off, you’ll never get 100% round fritters. There are always a few that resemble puffer fish. That’s cool… they still taste good!

But, to try to get fairly even drops, I like to use the two spoon method. This is kind of like making quenelles, except you are making rounds instead of ovals. Start with a small scoop in one spoon. Then, use a second spoon to scoop the dough to the other spoon, rounding it off some. You can go back and forth between the spoons if you didn’t quite get a round. Finally, use the first spoon again, to push the round into the oil. Like so:

Like the squash bars, you can make these with just about any kind of pumpkin or sweet winter squash. I think they are quite tasty plain, but they’d also be great dusted with a bit of powdered or cinnamon sugar. They’d also be great with a bit of small apple dice mixed in!