Tuesday 10 June 2014

Vanilla Donuts with Basic Vanilla Glaze

Some of you might already know that I'm completely addicted to pinterest. I sometimes spend my time on there looking at front doors (weird, I know), holiday destinations or house ideas for when I eventually spread my overgrown wings and find my own place to live, but more often than not when I'm up pinning at 4am, it's recipes. If you follow me on twitter you might have seen the endless stream of abuse from Will and my boss Stefan about how much I bake and yet they'd never ever been allowed to try my baked goods, so when I finally gave in and agreed to make Will whatever it was he wanted, he had to pick one thing I'd had literally no experience with; donuts. Still, luckily for me Friday was National Donut Day (no, really) and so there were a lot of recipes floating around. I sent my mum off to get me a donut pan, and this is pretty much how my Saturday turned out.


The donut recipe I used was from Sally's Baking Addiction and was really simple to follow, it will yield around 6 donuts, but works well if you double up. Also, it's American and uses cups which means it's so much faster to do. In a large bowl you want to mix 1 cup of plain flour, 6 Tbsp granulated sugar and 1 tsp of baking powder. In a seperate bowl, mix together an egg, 2 tbsp of milk, 4 Tbsp plain greek yoghurt, 0.5 tsp of vanilla extract and a tablespoon of melted butter. Literally then all you need to do is gradually add wet to dry and mix until just incorporated; DO NOT OVERMIX, I CANNOT STRESS IT ENOUGH. Grease your donut tray and then put the mixture into a piping bag (it's somewhere between a dough and a runny cake mix, it's quite thick but obviously thin enough to pipe) and pipe into donut pan, you want each about 2/3 full, obviously not covering the centre hole. Bake at gas mark 3 for around 10 minutes, the tops should spring back when touched, then take out of the pan to start cooling.

Then the glaze, I made about half of the krispy kreme-esque glaze that I found on My Thirty Spot, but ended up adding tons more vanilla. You'll need about 2 Tbsp of butter + another 2 tsp of butter (awkward, I know, but it's because it's halved and the original recipe called for 1/3 of a cup) melting on the hob. When completely melted, take off the hob and mix in a cup of icing sugar, and vanilla essence to taste (the recipe says about 3/4 tsp, but I found mine still tasted too buttery, so added and tasted until it resembled a smoother vanilla flavour.) If the texture isn't quite right, add some hot water in tablespoon increments. Then literally dip the donuts and leave the glaze to dry (to get a decent glaze, you need to double or maybe even triple dip.)


Although admittedly this is my first batch, they didn't turn out too bad, but I did run into some issues! Filling the tin is harder than I expected, and often I overfilled and had barely there holes or underfilled and had not puffy enough donuts. Also, because of the nature of the tin and the fact it has to be greased, the bottom comes out a deeper colour and a much harder texture (not a bad thing, just not the ideal donut texture). If I manage to ace either of these things, I promise I'll post an update! The donuts are well nice though, so still worth a go.

Have you tried making donuts lately? What combinations have you been trying?

S xo.

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