10 October 2012

Doughnut Dreams

My doughnut pan arrived while we were in Thailand a couple weeks ago and since then I’ve been busy trying out recipes. I’m telling myself I’m testing them for an upcoming charity bake sale, but really I just want to eat doughnuts.

Chocolate frosted.
I blogged about chocolate doughnuts at the Hardship Homemaking blog recently.

Next up was pumpkin doughnuts. I used the recipe from King Arthur Flour but I replaced the regular flour with Pamela's Gluten-Free Baking and Pancake Mix. The recipe has potential but I made a few errors that resulted in overly sweet, sticky doughnuts with almost no pumpkin and spice flavor. Muffin and I both have a major sweet tooth and these were even too sweet for us. When a two-year-old puts down a half-eaten doughnut and says it’s too much, it’s way too much.

My first error was using coconut oil instead of light olive oil or vegetable oil. I thought it would be a healthy alternative to vegetable oil and it’s cheaper than olive oil. I wasn’t counting on the flavor completely overpowering the rest of the doughnut.

Sprinkling the cinnamon and sugar.
Also, I ran out of white sugar so used half white and half demerara sugar, which is a local brown sugar substitute that has a burnt-sugar-caramel taste to it. I thought it would complement the pumpkin and spice flavors. It was too sweet and too sticky. It was as if the doughnuts had been dipped in syrup when all they’d done was sit on the counter for a couple hours.

For my next attempt at the pumpkin doughnuts I am stocking up on white sugar, I will use a light, flavorless oil, and I am also going to amp up the spices a bit. I can’t find canned pumpkin here so I have to make my own puree and the pumpkins here don’t seem to be as flavorful as American pumpkins. 

I’m definitely doing the pumpkin doughnuts for the bake sale since pumpkins are in season right now in India. I think they’ll be popular among Indians and Americans alike, given the time of year. I’d like to make a second variety of doughnuts as well. I’m trying to decide between the chocolate doughnuts, replacing the pumpkin puree with applesauce for complementary pumpkin pie and apple pie doughnuts, or trying another new recipe entirely – toasted coconut. What do you think?

5 comments:

Pamela Walker said...

I love doughnut vary much. I am very grateful to you for sharing the delicious recipes of pumpkin doughnuts.

Becky said...

I'd love to hear how the toasted coconut goes. That sounds awesome. (But I'm sort of partial to coconut and apples are expensive here.) Honestly, the apple one sounds pretty good too. I may need to drag out my doughnut pan.

Stephanie said...

The apples here are reasonably priced (at least compared to our last post) but are not great quality because they are imported from so far away. Some local apples are in season now so I'm using them for pies, crisps, and applesauce while they are still good.

Anonymous said...

I'm running Marine Corps Marathon this month so I'm running a lot these days, and I'm hungry all of the time! The picture of the chocolate frosted doughnut at the top of your post made my mouth water, and by the end I was ready to drive to the store at 10:30pm for a doughnut. Nice post Steph!

Stephanie said...

Thanks David! Congratulations on getting into the marathon and good luck! I can't wait to hear about it.