After our marathon bake last week, we had a much simpler task this week. This was also Aubrey’s first week back to school and, since she created the schedule, I doubt that was just by chance. We have actually made yeast doughnuts in the past so our doughnut discovery involved cake doughnuts. We are baking them because frying will add 10 pounds to my hips just thinking about it. (La, la, la, la, I’m not thinking about it.)
Baked cake doughnuts it is!! But, what flavor? If there’s a cake flavor, it’s probably also a doughnut flavor. Having said that, just make sure you don’t use an actual cake recipe for doughnuts. The little research I did helped me avoid that mistake!
Well, call us boring, but (spiced) vanilla, chocolate, and blueberry got the nod. Those were the flavors requested by our taste testers. Aubrey’s subscription to Bake From Scratch offered an entire issue on doughnuts (Jan/Feb 2020) and that’s where we got our vanilla recipe. The chocolate and blueberry recipes came from blogs.
Since we used 3 different recipes, I’m going to post the links to all 3 of them but only list one of them. Making a batter is virtually the same for any flavor. I’m going to post the chocolate one because it ended up being our favorite.
https://prettysimplesweet.com/?s=chocolate+doughnuts (our favorite)
https://girlheartfood.com/baked-blueberry-donuts/ (second place)
Ingredients
Chocolate Doughnuts (Makes 8)
- 1 cup (140g) all-purpose flour
- 1/4 cup (25g) unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 1 large egg
- 1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar
- 1/3 cup (80 ml) milk
- 1/4 cup (60 ml) yogurt
- 2 tablespoons (30g) unsalted butter, melted
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Chocolate Glaze
- 1/2 cup (85g) semi-sweet chocolate or chocolate chips
- 3 tablespoons heavy cream
- 2 tablespoons (30g) unsalted butter
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F/180°. Grease a donut pan with oil or butter. Set aside.
- Make the donuts: Whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Set aside.
- In a medium bowl whisk egg with sugar until well combined. Add milk, yogurt, melted butter and vanilla extract, and whisk until combined. Pour into the flour mixture and mix until just combined. The batter will be thick.
- Fill donut cavities with batter ¾ way full using a spoon or a piping bag (much easier). Cut a corner off the bottom of the bag and pipe the batter into each donut cup.
- Bake for 9–10 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the donuts comes out clean. Allow to cool for 5 minutes in pan, then remove donuts from pan and transfer to a wire rack. Allow to cool completely before glazing.
- Make the chocolate glaze: Melt the chocolate, heavy cream, and butter gently in the microwave (in 30-second intervals, stirring in between) or a double boiler until smooth. Dip the tops of the donuts into the chocolate glaze, and place on a cooling rack to set.
- Donuts are best eaten the same day or keep them for up to 3 days in the refrigerator.
Our Experience
Once again, I’ll start with substitutions. In all of the recipes, we substituted white whole wheat when all purpose was specified and regular cake flour where cake flour was specified. We used unsweetened almond milk for all of the milk. We used a half and half mixture of Allulose and Ideal sugar substitutes in place of the sugar. No substitutions were made for any of the butter, cream, or yogurt.
To make the batters, we used the KitchenAid mixer with the paddle attachment and followed the directions as written. While I posted the chocolate recipe, most of the photos are from the blueberry recipe. By the last batter, taking pictures becomes a chore.
When making consecutive recipes with different oven temperatures, we usually try to start with the lowest temperature and work our way up. Kip (my husband) decided to make a pizza right before we were ready to bake so while we had originally planned to start with the lowest temp and work our way up, we ended up starting high and worked our way down.
Also, this post is going to be mostly pictures because making a batter is pretty simple and doesn’t need much elaboration.
in the batter rather than falling to the bottom.
bottom will become the top anyway, so, we weren’t worried.
(We only had one pan and had to keep moving.)
Having filled the pan almost completely (not by choice), we were surprised that they didn’t get any bigger.
that we put in a ramekin since we needed to use the pan for the next batch.
This glaze was thicker and with the zest in it, it seemed lumpy but it covered the doughnuts just fine. This glaze solidified as expected. It was also quite tart with the lemon juice but very flavorful.
This batter was a lot runnier than the blueberry and definitely the chocolate batter once we made it. This batter ran out of the piping bag like pancake batter would.
flipped over. These were really flat and the Pam spray with flour burned on the edges.
We could tell something was off on this recipe while it was baking. Of course, we always try to figure out if we measured something wrong or if one of our substitutions could have caused the problem. We may have to try them again but with regular flour and see if that was where we caused the problem.
was our second batch and we knew not to fill them too full. These are about half full.
the other two. They’re almost muffins (no holes).
of the cake out of the middle to create the doughnut hole.
These grew so much bigger than the other two we almost lost the holes. For this batter, I would only fill the pan 1/2 full. We had to cut the centers out of our first batch but the second batch was perfect.
This glaze was smooth and creamy and kept its shiny appearance even after it had set. It was the easiest to dip into because it only took one shot. It was soft to the touch but didn’t come off on your fingers. It was by far the best of the 3 glazes. By the way, we used the microwave for melting the chocolate.
This doughnut was tasty but not what was expected by our taste testers. The request for blueberry doughnuts should have been more specific…like, “I want them to taste just like the ones from Hyvee.” The lemon wasn’t appreciated as much as we thought it would be.
This doughnut had an odd texture. It might have been our flour substitutions. It was a lot like a corn bread texture and was the least favorite because of that. The glaze was also pretty runny and it never really got hard. Even a couple days later it was still wet and would come off if it was touched. (The recipe called for a chocolate glaze and we made a vanilla glaze instead.)
Again, the best one in the bunch. It had a cakey texture (though not as dense as a lot of cake doughnuts you get at the store) and the glaze was perfect. This was almost a bitter sweet chocolate or like a dark chocolate because it was just barely sweet.
What we liked.
Chocolate: Obviously, we liked this doughnut. It got 5 out of 5 thumbs up. It was a thicker batter and, once cooked, had the best texture. The glaze was pretty, easy to apply, and tasted good.
Blueberry: This was also a good doughnut. It got 3 out of 5 thumbs up and 2 sideways thumbs from those who didn’t appreciate the lemon. The batter wasn’t as thick as the chocolate so it wasn’t as easy to work with. We had to cut the hole in the piping bag really big because some of the blueberries were huge so it came out pretty fast when there wasn’t a blueberry blocking the opening. The texture wasn’t really cakey, maybe more like a blueberry muffin. Aubrey and I liked the lemon glaze but it was strong and pretty tart so if that’s not your thing, I’d just make it with milk and no lemon juice or zest.
Vanilla: It was a bit of a disappointment. This got various reviews but no solid thumbs up. The batter was so thin it was hard to believe that we were supposed to pipe it into the pan. The flavor was good but it could have used some more cinnamon and nutmeg since we weren’t using the chocolate glaze. This one was better the next day (I don’t know about the others because they were gone). The glaze was just too wet. It was thick and took a couple dips to get the coverage we wanted but it never hardened up like we were expecting.
What we would change.
Chocolate: While very good, it wasn’t a really sweet doughnut and the glaze wasn’t either. Even I would have been OK with a little more sweetener in the batter. I might add 1/4 to 1/2 cup more sugar for a sweeter cake and leave the glaze as is.
Blueberry: Other than taking out the lemon in the glaze (for some) I wouldn’t change any other ingredients. I would suggest that if using fresh blueberries like we did, pick out the smallest ones you can find. It will help when you are piping them out. The smaller blueberries will also help prevent losing an entire section of the doughnut to exploding blueberries. They’re more in scale with the doughnut.
Vanilla: I think we have to do some additional experimenting with this one. Maybe it was the flour substitutions or the sugar substitutes or a bit of both. The texture was too much like cornbread for everyone to like them. As for the glaze, we need to find a new one for these if we want to have a vanilla glaze again. Even the blueberry doughnut’s glaze without the lemon would have been better.
What we learned.
First of all, we learned that the batter for a cake doughnut needs to be thicker than a cake batter. The thinner batters didn’t turn out as well. We also learned that, if you plan to make doughnuts with any frequency, you need 2 pans! We figured out that we don’t like “Pam” spray with flour. I’d rather grease and flour the pan myself. Finally, if you plan to give your doughnuts away, make sure you give the glaze plenty of time to dry. If you are going to gobble them up yourself, no need to wait.
Until next week, happy baking!!