Catching Up: Learning To Make Donuts

[tuftears]

For a while now, dracosphynx has been encouraging me to take cooking classes. He finally got me to do it with a class on 'homemade donuts' -- it was even at a 50% discount. Ooh!



I got there about half an hour early for the class time of 9 AM-- and realized the whole mall was virtually closed. Even Sur La Table only opened at about 10 or so. Whoops. Well, I kicked back for a bit.

The class was held in a small kitchen area in the back. Here's what the kitchen looked like. They had several people bustling around at all times, prepping various things and cleaning up dishes after use. They had an industrial strength dishwasher that could clean dishes in like 10 minutes flat.



We made three kinds of donuts: maple bars, lemon-poppyseed donuts, and spiced gluten-free donuts. The first were fried, so we started with pre-made dough, which had been given time to rise, then shaped them into bras or cut them into circles with holes in the middle. The other two were baked and both involved making the dough, then pouring them with these pastry bags into the donut trays.



There wouldn't be enough space in the kitchen for each group to have a chance to cook if we had to gather around just the burners, so they had a set of individual propane burners like the one shown above. We made frosting for the gluten-free donuts with white chocolate drops, stirred in with a bit of cocoa powder and other stuff.



We fried up donuts and put them on trays to rest. The rings we dusted with powdered sugar; the bars we covered with maple glaze. Not a great deal to say about the frying process; it's similar to how I make fried chicken, except they used a lot more oil.

I actually worked up enough bravery to suggest to a couple classmates that we go do lunch nearby, and two of them took me up on it! One turned out to be a co-worker at Google. Small world!

Comments

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

*Plots kytteny donut-pillage!* =o.o=

How was the maple glaze made, out of curiosity?

I've made donuts with family in the distant mists of time, but we didn't do anything anywhere as involved as this (just made batter, cut it into rings, fried it, and called it done). I am sorely tempted to try again after hearing how well yours turned out =^.^=.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

(looks at recipes handout)

Maple icing:

2 cups (8 ounces) confectioners' sugar
1 teaspoon light corn syrup
1/4 kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
1 teaspoon maple extract
3 tablespoons hot water, more if needed

Simply whisk it all together in a medium bowl.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

I'll probably end up going with a simplified variant that takes advantage of the fact that we have maple syrup up here =^.^=. Thanks for the recipe!

(Blind guess would be "2 c confectioners' sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 3 tbsp maple syrup", but that'll probably need tweaking; I'd also likely go with the "bring to a boil and pour while hot" approach.)

[rowyn]

But how did they taste? Would you make donuts again, or are they more trouble than they're worth? :9

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I did get some spiced apple cider doughnut mix so I can try it at some point.

Fried ones taste like fried dough (yum!), baked ones taste like cakes/biscuits. I'm wondering if I can fry the batter I'd use for baking.

They were all pretty good. The maple bars were the best, the powdered sugar/not-maple-glazed ones most so, the lemon poppyseed doughnuts were good too.