Lavender cream doughnuts

Warning - avert your eyes to avoid addiction.

Recently, The Guardian published a spread on Justin Gellatly, formerly of Fergus Henderson's St Johns in London, but now of Bread Ahead in Borough Market.   Justin had published a baking book called Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding with a gorgeous photo of cream-filled doughnuts on the cover.  I immediately fell in love with this book and bought it.

You don't have to buy the book to get a hold of Justin's doughnut recipe - it is published here in The Guardian.  However, if you don't have the book, you won't find out all of the amazing different filling variations for these doughnuts.

Now don't get me wrong - making these doughnuts is a bit of a production.  However, they are soooooooo  good that it is worth it. 

I chose to flavour my custard with lavender liqueur from Castle Glen, inspired by Justin's violet cream version, and sprinkled the top of the donuts with crushed crystallised violets because they look so pretty: 

Take a look inside these fat, delicious doughnuts:

Instead of bread flour, I just used plain white flour to make my doughnuts, which seemed to work just fine.  I cut down some of the production in the recipe, by not chilling the dough overnight, and only rising my doughnuts for 2 hours instead of four, which seemed plenty for them to double in size.  I also didn't bother with checking the temperature of the cooking oil with a thermometer, which seems a bit of a faff and makes the recipe a little unapproachable.  Instead, I just heated the oil until the handle of a wooden spoon generated bubbles when dipped into the hot oil, and cooked away.

The donuts turned out just fine, despite my changes to the method - they were cooked on the outside and on the inside without burning, and plumped  up perfectly when I piped in the pastry cream.

The only problem that eventuated was that these doughnuts were irresistible. I made a half batch and got 9 donuts, ate 2 of them and promptly had to get the rest out of my house so I was not tempted to scoff the lot.  I gave the remaining donuts to my friends boxed in pretty little boxes that I picked up at Woollies:

These donuts smell devine, like the best bakery you have ever walked into, and as I mentioned, are well worth the time needed to make them.