Doughnuts! - Daring Bakers October 2010

OKAY! My first Daring Bakers challenge is now complete! Done! Whew! I'd been wanting to join The Daring Bakers for a while now but hadn't had "the onions" until my raging jealousy got the best of me when I found out that their last challenge was sugar cookies. Oh, the fun I could have had! Bah!

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

The doughnut challenge totally freaked me out because I'm not a fan of frying. Don't get me wrong, I'm a southern girl so I like fried just about anything, but the actual act of frying is not my thing. Spattering oil, hot messes, bad timing and don't even get me started with the clean up! I put it off until the last possible day. Seriously, I made the dough yesterday and fried them this morning. All month I tried to come up with an original spin on doughnuts. I decided almost immediately to use the recipe given for bombolonis, which are italian doughnut holes. My craving for my all time favorite pastry, the cannoli, kept coming back to me. Why not, right? After all, I may as well put an italian spin on it.

The dough itself was incredibly easy to make, especially in a stand mixer with a dough hook. (which had not been used in the 5 years that I've had it. ever. really.) It was seriously tricky to roll out. The recipe states that you should roll it out on a lightly floured surface but mine definitely needed more than a little flour!


Of course, just in case they sucked I needed a back up doughnut and for this I used the original recipe, which called for raspberry jam filled bombolonis. I rolled these in superfine sugar and filled them with a decent quality raspberry jam.












As for my crazy cannoli doughnut, I made a regular cannoli filling with whole milk ricotta that had been draining for 24 hours, mixed with powdered sugar, cinnamon and mini chocolate chips. I also folded in a little freshly whipped cream to lighten it a bit. After frying the doughnuts, I rolled them in a mixture of powdered sugar, cinnamon, allspice and ground pistachios, then filled them with the ricotta mixture after they'd cooled a bit. They were pretty tasty but definitely left me wanting the crunchy cannoli shell.

Neither of the kids had a problem with the doughnuts, in fact Ellie thought they needed more filling. You can see her chipmunk cheeks are FULL of doughnut!

All in all, I think that I'll leave the doughnuts to my all time favorite place, Lone Star Bakery (Round Rock doughnuts, they're seriously hard to beat!) but I can't wait for my next challenge!