PhDCupcaker

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!