Baked Doughnuts with Citrus Curd

If you are a fan of doughnuts but deep frying makes you go cold, baked doughnuts could be the answer for you.  Honey & Co The Baking Book features a recipe for Baked Doughnuts filled with Lemon and Lime Curd that doesn't even require a special pan or a doughnut cutter - you just roll a butter rich dough into balls, bake them, coat them in butter and citrus sugar, and fill them with citrus curd.

Don't they look great:

Be careful though - they are very rich and buttery and sugary, so in the future, I would make them half the size.

I used Dorie's Citrus Curd to fill the doughnuts  rather than making the Honey & Co lemon and lime curd.

Tempted?  The recipe (with a few modifications by me) is as follows:

Dough

3 eggs
1 x 7g sachet dried yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
300g white bread flour
25ml milk
125g diced cold butter

Filling

Citrus curd 

Put all the dough ingredients except the butter in a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook and combine at low speed.  Once the dough forms a ball, add the butter, a little at a time, until it is all combined into the dough.  Cover the bowl and chill in the fridge for 4 hours or overnight.

Take the chilled dough and divide it into 8 even sized pieces (~ 80g each).  Roll each piece into a ball on a floured surface, and place on a baking tray (about 5 cm apart).  Allow the balls to rise to double their original size.  (Mine took ages - well over an hour.)

Heat your oven to 230 degrees Celsius.  Bake the risen doughnuts in the oven for 8-10 minutes, by which time they should be golden brown on the outside. 

While the doughnuts are baking, melt 160g butter.

In another bowl, combine 100g sugar with the zest of a lime and rub the zest into the sugar until fragrant. (I used the zest of half a lemon instead.)

Remove the doughnuts from the oven and allow to stand for 4 minutes.  Using tongs, dip the doughnuts, one at a time, into the melted butter, then roll in the sugar.  All of the butter should be soaked up by the 8 doughnuts.  Be careful when handling the warm doughnuts, as they are quite fragile.

Pipe citrus curd into the doughnuts using a piping bag fitted with a long tip, inserted into the top of each doughnut.

Preferably serve warm on the day they are made.