Adventures with my Mixer / How to make Donuts

 The mainstream consumption of donuts is really only in its infancy in lil' old New Zealand. We have all done cupcakes, dabbled with macaroons, maybe the next big thing will be donuts. I'm not so sure what that will bring to our waistlines, but I have always believed in all foods in moderation. I recently found a recipe for Grapefruit Donuts on A beautiful Mess an American blog I follow. Not so sure about the Grapefruit part of it, I adapted the recipe back to plain and added lemon icing for a bit of zing. It was a super easy recipe to mix; the hardest part is getting them from the tray to the deep fryer without too many dents and squashes.

Lemon Iced Donuts

1 cup milk
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons dry yeast
2 eggs
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons butter - melted and cooled, but not set
4 cups high grade flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

Warm the milk and add the sugar and yeast. Whisk the mixture until the yeast is dissolved, then leave it for 5 to 10 minutes until it starts to froth.

Combine the butter and eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the yeast mixture and stir to combine. Add the flour and salt and mix using the dough hook attachment. 

I love my commercial mixer: its a fab piece of time saving kit. 

The mixture will start to come together to form a soft springy dough. Once it starts to slap against the sides of the bowl, remove from the mixer and knead by hand on a board for a few minutes.

Put the dough into an oiled bowl; turn the dough over so the top is oiled as well. Cover and leave over night in the fridge.

The next day take the dough from the fridge and leave for 15 minutes before kneading for 5 minutes until it returns to room temperature. 


The dough should be soft and springy.


I rolled some of mine straight from the fridge, but they turned out a lot flatter that the ones that were kneaded for a while first. Set your oven to 50deg C ready to use to prove the donuts.

Roll out the dough to about 1.5cm in thickness and cut the donuts into shape using a large and small cutter.

Put onto a lined and oiled baking tray, leaving plenty of room in between each one so the donuts don't touch each other once they have risen.

Loosely cover with greased plastic wrap and put into the warm oven to prove for at least one hour.

Once proved gently transfer to either a deep fryer or heavy based pot of oil heated to 185deg. C. 

The hardest part of the whole recipe is gently transferring the donuts from the tray to the oil without putting finger prints and dents into the donuts before they fry.





Fry the donuts in batches for a few minutes on each side until golden brown. Drain onto kitchen paper or a clean tea towel, then transfer to a cooling rack ready to dip in icing.








Lemon Icing

2 cups of icing sugar
the juice of a lemon
enough bitter lemon cordial to form a pouring consistency icing

Combine the icing sugar, lemon juice and about 2 tablespoons of the cordial. Mix and add more cordial a teaspoon at a time until a pouring consistency is achieved.


Once the donuts have cooled, dunk the top side of each one into the icing and place on the cooling tray to dry. You could double dunk them once they have dried if you want a thicker layer of icing.

The recipe makes about 24 large donuts; enough for a crowd. We gave some to two sets of our neighbours and fed the remainder to friends that came to visit. Like all home baked, non preservative laden yeast items, they are much better eaten fresh. Next time, unless I'm feeding a bunch of hungry blokes, I'm going to make them smaller as they are quite a mouthful. 

If your making them at your house I'd love to know how you got on.