Daring Bakers - Let's Go Nuts for Doughnuts!

What can beat the smell of a hot cinnamon donut and a cup of coffee? Not much, in my books, especially first thing in the morning. The combination says "rise and shine, today will be a good day". Which leads me on to this month's Daring Bakers challenge:

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

After a huge thumbs up from Audax, I chose old-fashioned yeast donuts from a recipe by Alton Brown. I didn't feel too daring this month, as I have made donuts before - both baked and fried. However, it is always a challenge to do battle with my deep fear of deep frying.

Here is my donut dough after rising - the yeast got pretty excited:



After punching down the dough and rolling it out, I cut out the donut shapes using a round biscuit cutter and the lid off my Italian vanilla essence:



I left some donuts "whole" so that I could fill them with jam after frying - I wanted the best of both worlds.

After leaving the donuts to rise a little, they are deep fried in a pool of oil:


Immediately after removing the donuts from the oil and draining them briefly in a slotted spoon, I tossed the donuts in a combination of vanilla sugar and cinnamon sugar, then fillled the round hole-less ones with jam by inserting a piping bag filled with jam into the base and pumping in the jam. The end result is what you see at the top of this post.

Thanks to Lori for being our host this month. She will have the recipe for these and a few other types of donuts, if you are feeling hungry enough to go and make your own donuts right now. And you can check out a veritable rainbow of all kinds of other donuts by visiting the Daring Bakers blogroll.