Banana Donuts

While I admit I'm a bit behind on my baking blog posts, I certainly haven't been behind on my baking. I made these delicious Banana Donuts on June 27, during my summer staycation off from work. I can't remember the exact motivation for donuts--perhaps I had browning bananas at the time, perhaps I just wanted to make something delicious to deliver to my mom. Either way it was a fun endeavor with a pleasing result.

In attempting to make my banana donuts, I knew I wanted to find a recipe where I could use self-rising flour. I still had some leftover that my mom had given me after making Jamie Oliver's deliciously easy pancakes for Valentine's Day, and I wanted to put it to good use. A quick search found me a great recipe from King Arthur Flour with directions on how to adapt it for self-rising flour. I cut the baking soda, lowered the amount of salt, and included the cinnamon since I was using bananas and they pair well together. I then borrowed a quick cinnamon-sugar recipe from the website Kitchn, and had the donuts ready in no time.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 and 1/4 cups white sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/2 cups mashed bananas
2 cups self-rising flour

For the topping:

1/4 cup white sugar
1 Tablespoon cinnamon

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Beat together the oil, eggs, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and salt. Stir in the bananas.

2.) Slowly stir in the self-rising flour until the batter is smooth but still has some lumps of banana. Pour the batter into a donut pan (sprayed liberally with nonstick cooking spray) until nearly full.

3.) Bake approximately 18 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the donut comes out clean or with a tiny bit of crumbs attached. Remove from oven and loosen the edges with a plastic knife. Wait 5 minutes, and then transfer the donuts to a wire rack.

4.) While the donuts are warm, dip them into a bowl filled with the cinnamon-sugar mixture topping. Coat thoroughly, then turn over and coat the other side. Serve while warm, if possible, though the donuts taste good at room temperature as well.

Donuts, Part Deux

While I preferred the taste of my first attempt at donuts--Bacon Cake Donuts that didn't quite taste like bacon but were still so delicious--I did prefer the look (i.e., the toppings) of my second donut attempt shown here. In this second attempt at baked (not fried!) dough, I pretty much just followed Wilton's Baked Cake Donut recipe on the back of my pan, except I doubled the amount of batter so I could have enough treats for my family and my coworkers. They were tasty, but I think the addition of a little bacon grease and brown sugar instead of white sugar really made a difference in the overall flavor (and color--this week's caked donuts turned out rather pale underneath the toppings). However, my second donut attempt still received many compliments and make a nice treat for anyone--especially with chocolate and sprinkles on top!

So if you'd like to recreate the recipe, I'll still share what I did below. The recipe for an awesome chocolate topping--also from the Wilton's donut pan but with a little more chocolate--follows!

Chocolate Cake Donuts

Ingredients:
4 cups cake flour, sifted

1 and 1/2 cups granulated sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 teaspoon salt

1 and 1/2 cups buttermilk

4 eggs, lightly beaten

4 tablespoons butter, melted

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Spray your donut pan with nonstick cooking spray or line a cupcake pan with paper cupcake liners (I got lazy and decided that instead of trying to fill my six-donut pan over and over again, I would make a batch of donut-flavored cupcakes to finish off the batter).

2.) In a very large mixing bowl, sift the cake flour, sugar, baking powder, nutmeg and salt. Add in the buttermilk and eggs. Make sure your melted butter has cooled slightly before adding it last. Beat carefully until all ingredients are just combined--no more flour should be visible, but the batter shouldn't be overmixed.

3.) Fill your donut pan or cupcake liners approximately 2/3 to 3/4 full and bake for about 9-10 minutes (mine still came out pale at 10 minutes even though the original recipe calls for 7-9 minutes. And I did three separate batches in the oven rather than try to fit all my filled tins in there at once, so who knows why they still came out so light?).

4.) Let the donuts cool about 2-5 minutes before prying them gently from the pan with a couple of toothpicks. Place on a wire rack to cool completely before dipping them in a bowl of chocolate glaze and then a bowl of sprinkles. Recipe for Chocolate Glaze is below.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup plus 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

2 Tablespoons unsalted butter

2 Tablespoons light corn syrup

Directions:

1). In a microwave-safe bowl, combine the 1/2 cup of chocolate chips, butter and corn syrup. Microwave on 50 percent power for 50 seconds.

2). Carefully remove the bowl from the microwave (it will be hot--I used potholders) and add the extra 1/4 cup of chocolate chips, stirring while you add. The mixture should turn from thin drizzle to thick frosting consistency. And it tastes as good as it looks!

That's it! But don't forget these key details in the donut-making process:

1. Donuts taste best when fresh. They will get stale quickly when left out and attempted to eat two days later. All is not lost, however, if you want to eat donut leftovers! Place them in an airtight plastic baggie to stave off staleness as long as possible! If all else fails, dip rock-hard donuts in coffee to instantly soften them up!

2. These donuts can be made into cupcakes! Because they rise so much (and because I got lazy), I thought it made perfect sense to try filling a few cupcake liners with donut batter too! It worked! Just be careful peeling off the paper as they tend to stick.

3. The dipping in chocolate and sprinkles is the fun part! I try to get just the right amount of glaze on each one, turning the donuts so they leave a smooth design of chocolate and an evenly spread sprinkling of sprinkles. If you really want to be daring, you can try the chocolate glaze on top of the Bacon donuts mentioned earlier. Use bacon bits instead of sprinkles to top the chocolate and enhance the bacon flavor. Doesn't that sound good?

4. Despite bacon, chocolate, butter and sugar...these donuts are healthy! Somewhat healthy! They're baked (not fried!) and made with all-natural homemade ingredients. So that's a start!

All-in-all, I'd say donuts are a success in my book no matter how you make them. It was a fun experiment for me to try, having never ever made a donut before this month! But I will definitely be baking them again!

"Donuts, I got Donuts"

If you're a Simpsons TV show fan, go ahead and say it with me: "Mmm...donuts." Or we can sing Chief Wiggum's donut song: "Donuts, I got donuts...."

Don't know what I'm talking about? D'oh! Oh well, just check out the awesome pictures and the recipe below for my first ever attempt at homemade donuts!  Finally, finally, another success!  I owe it all to shopping with my mom at Bed, Bath & Beyond where I swore I wasn't going to buy anything, until I saw it: a shiny, enticing, never-before-owned-by-me donut pan, complete with recipe ideas attached. I happen to absolutely without a doubt love donuts, and absolutely without a doubt never eat them because I don't eat fried foods anymore. Le sigh.

However, one of my favorite types of donuts used to be the glazed "cake" donut (pancakes, shortcakes, birthday cakes--do you see a pattern in my favorite treats?). And everyone knows cake is baked, not fried. (Yay, healthier already!). So I took the Wilton's recipe for standard Baked Cake Doughnuts that came with my new pan, and twisted it up with the one food item I'd been wanting to incorporate into my baked goods forever. The one item I knew could dress up a standard donut recipe and make it shine--or perhaps sizzle. Bacon.

Now these donuts did not turn out overwhelmingly bacon-y in taste (is that good or bad?) so I might have to experiment with adding just a little more bacon grease and bits next time. But the result was still fluffy, sweet, and so delicious.

Bacon Cake Donuts

Ingredients:


2 cups cake flour, sifted
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 eggs
1 and 2/3 Tablespoons melted butter
1/3 Tablespoon (1 teaspoon) bacon grease
1 teaspoon bacon bits (cooked bacon, chopped)

Directions:


1). Preheat the oven to 425 degrees a spray a donut pan with nonstick cooking spray (or, if you don't have a donut pan, I suppose you could use a muffin tin and see what happens!). In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt.

2). In a separate bowl, combine the brown sugar, buttermilk, eggs, melted butter and bacon grease. (The grease is easy enough to collect from bacon heated on the stove--I used about nine small pieces of precooked Trader Joe's Fully Cooked Uncured Bacon to get a teaspoon of grease, though). It helps if the butter and grease has cooled a little before adding them to the mixture--otherwise they'll curdle the eggs.

3). Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and beat gently until just combined. Bake approximately seven minutes, then remove from oven and let sit at least five minutes before removing from the pan carefully with a couple of toothpicks on the sides of the donuts to turn them out. Let cool slightly, then drizzle with icing or dip in frosting if so desired.

My intention was to create a "Maple-Bacon" breakfast kind of donut, actually, but I just couldn't get my frosting to taste or look quite right. So that's an experiment for another day. Rather than wait until I had a perfect maple syrup frosting recipe concocted before writing this post, I figured I'd best just get it up here and you can either use your favorite canned frosting, try out one of my previous recipes like eggnog frosting or just eat them plain (that's what I did!) with a side of coffee for dunkin'. Tasted perfect to me! You won't have to say "D'oh!" and "Nuts!" separately ever again. Mmm...donuts....