Have a Donut

MC • 2nd Feb 2009 • The Daily Nonsense • donuts, food, recipe, sugar

Ever since I got back from Puerto Rico, I’ve been distracted. It’s always hard to get back into daily routine after a 9 day stint abroad. I’m working on a Puerto Rico entry which was originally intended as a culinary guide for the island, but now I’m not sure which direction I want to take it. Vacation entries can be astronomically boring but I feel like since Puerto Rico is an extension of the United States (something a tourist apparently couldn’t grasp when he asked, rather obnoxiously, what amount in dollars a beach towel was) I should at least try to present an accurate and helpful description of dining and vacationing there.

I’m working on it.

In the mean time, I wanted to offer a donut. You know, so you wouldn’t think I was dead and didn’t care about you or your blog. I made donuts on Sunday and I felt pretty nervous about it. My parents and my grandmother were heading over for some donuts and coffee since my boyfriend had mentioned to them earlier that I could make them from scratch. Theoretically make them from scratch. I had never made donuts before, I didn’t have a deep frying thermometer and I wasn’t prepared to make dough from scratch so I was thoroughly freaking out. A box of  donuts from Dunkin Donuts sat on the counter nearby, in case of disaster.

Using Pillsbury’s Pizza Dough and basically just guessing when about 2 or 3 cups of oil were hot enough, I made donuts. And they turned out pretty well. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they were Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts quality, but we didn’t end up with leftovers either. It’s seriously not as hard as I thought it would be. The only complaint I would make is that the Pillsbury dough is frustratingly elastic, so rolling it out again to use the scraps takes a lot of work but it can be done. After frying, the donuts drained for a few seconds on some paper towels then I rolled them in a cinnamon sugar mixture  (my boyfriend tried making glaze but gave up when he couldn’t get the right consistency).

This is probably the only food picture I’ve actually posed – I piled all the fluffy properly fried donuts on top and hid all the overcooked ones on the bottom. Seriously, when recipes describe frying up donuts in a mere minute and a half, they mean business.