Merhaba, or hello from Turkey! When I saw that the second Club: BAKED selection was doughnuts I was so excited! Thanks to Gloria from The Ginger Snap Girl for choosing this for our second recipe!  This probably isn’t something I would have just thought to try on my own. I am now totally in love with making my own doughnuts. I thought it would be really complicated, but it was as easy as pie (or should I say doughnuts)! I was most nervous about frying the doughnuts since I’ve never fried before, but it really was a cinch. I knew I had to make these early and so I made them on a day when we were planning to go to the Drive-in Movie Theater. What a great treat to bring – homemade doughnuts!  It all began with mixing all the dry ingredients and then adding the liquid ingredients in a little well in the center of the dry ingredients to create the dough. After quite a bit of folding I ended up with a ball of dough.  I rolled this out (maybe a little too thin as you will see later) and then used my cookie cutters to cut out the doughnuts (using a large  3 1/4 in. cutter for the outer part and a smaller 1 1/2 in. cutter to cut out the middle). Here is one tray of them all cut out and ready to go in the fridge for a while. I liked that all of the dough

was used since you could use the cut out centers to make doughnut holes. At this point I started to heat the oil. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, although it did take a lot of oil! I bought a new thermometer just for this because I wanted to make sure I had the temperature right and I wasn’t sure that the one I had was working. While the oil was heating I made the toppings. I made two of the toppings because I really wanted both the chocolate and the cinnamon sugar. Now it was time for frying! I just plopped them into the oil.

I was able to fit about three doughnuts at a time in my pan. As you can see in this second shot to the right they got pretty brown. I was worried they were going to be burnt. I followed the directions and fried them for 2-3 minutes on the first side and  probably shouldn’t have done them that long. I think they browned up faster because they were probably skinnier than 1/2 in… You think for a math person I would get my  measurements  right!  :-)  Anyway, even though they browned up pretty fast they didn’t burn and they all tasted fine. In the next few batches I fried them for a little less. Once they were done frying I dipped them in the chocolate and cinnamon sugar. I garnished a few of the chocolate ones with sprinkles and they were ready to eat.  We each ate one and then packaged up the

rest. Take that Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme – there is a new dougnut shop in town! We brought these with us to the movie and were able to enjoy fresh homemade doughnuts from our car while we watched X-Men: First Class. We waited until the movie started and so I didn’t get a picture of us eating the doughnuts, but here is me in the car before the movie started. We watched a good movie and had some good eats! To all my Club: BAKED friends – I’ll be sure to check out your doughnuts when I return!

I must admit that I made this NY-Style Crumb Cake a few weeks ago…. I just haven’t had any time lately to bake. We are leaving for Turkey next week and I still have a ton to do, but it was time to get this posted, so here it is! This is my first Club: BAKED post. Not sure if you read my post about joining Club: BAKED, but here it is. Karen from Karen’s Cookies, Cakes, & More who started the group choose NY-Style Crumb Cake for our first recipe. You can see her post here – I loved her idea of making these into jumbo cupcakes!  As a native New Yorker myself it was perfect! Not sure what the Baked Explorations authors would think about this comment I am about to make, but I will make

it anyway… it made me think about the Entenmann’s NY Style Crumb Cake. We used to eat that all the time. I made this the day before Josh had a meeting at school and so he was able to bring this with him. That was nice because it was too much for us to eat! Now this is not called a crumb cake for nothing – the pictures don’t really do it justice – the ratio of crumb to cake was over 50% for sure! Here is what the batter cake batter looked like before there was any crumb. I followed the recipe and used a 9 x 13 in pan. Other bakers were really creative and used muffin or jumbo cupcake pans – what a great idea! I decided to follow the little Baked Note about Renato liking huge crumb chunks and so I placed the crumb topping in the oven to dry out (maybe a little too much despite their warning). Here’s the before and after:

It doesn’t look too dry, but I guess since it got cooked again once I put it on top it got pretty crunchy. Next time I probably won’t do this part. Josh had some left overs from his meeting and I actually think it softened up a bit and tasted better 2 days after I made it! Anyway, here I am putting the crumb topping on. There was so much crumb topping! And finally… here is the final baked crumb cake (minus a piece or two). I am definitely going to enjoy baking along with everyone through this book. Check out Club: BAKED to see all the other crumb cakes. Stay tuned for the next installment … Up next is Farm Stand Buttermilk Doughnuts. Since I’ll be in Turkey I made those early too, but I’ll still be posting those on July 15.