dough nut

What to do on a Saturday when your original plans don't work out and you find yourself with a couple of extra hours? Make doughnuts!For Christmas this year, Britta received a cookbook and I had my eye on a recipe called, "Franchise-style Doughnuts". It is pretty obvious what this recipe is supposed to imitate with a introductory quote like this:

"You know the place that makes doughnuts that are served fresh and hot, and they sometimes give you one free as you gaze at a conveyor belt of doughnuts in various states of manufacture?"

Then it finished like this: "Are these like those? Almost."

It should be stated that other than 1 quickbread (banana) and 1 or 2 bread-maker loaves, I do not have any experience in making a yeast dough. Even so, I had my hopes set pretty high . . .

We don't have a doughnut cutter, so we improvised with an empty tupperware and the tube which normally holds toothpicks to cut out the holes.

Next time we need to find a way to make them smaller. They rose too much and became behemoths!

One of the biggest problems was keeping the oil at the right temperature. After about 5 doughnuts, the oil cooled by about 75 degrees, so I upped the burner, but then the oil got too hot. Each time I added a doughnut, the oil got even hotter. I couldn't figure it out. It was almost always too hot or too cold from then on. We had to adjust the cooking time for each doughnut.

The glaze is pretty much butter and powdered sugar. But it is Go-oo-ood. It is the glaze that makes the doughnuts so much like the 'other' ones.

Here is the finished product. They are good. And they're big. And there are too many of them. Please come over and help us eat them.

Please.