Desert Dough Delights

One thing I’ve been wanting to try but have been too scared to try is deep frying.  I’ve wanted to make doughnuts and beignets and things like that but the prospect of heating oil to a high temperature and then putting something in it made me think that my clumsy self would start a fire or burn my skin off or something.  This past weekend I finally decided to give it a try. 

I decided to try making a simple doughnut hole since it just making a dough and dropping it into the oil, I don’t need a special dispenser or a piping bag.  I just used a slotted spoon, a Dutch oven, and 5 cups of oil.

The dough was simple: Just flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, milk, and an egg.  This is an unyeasted dough so it’s leavened completely by the baking powder.  Making the dough was easy, the hard part was shaping the dough into hole shapes.  I used a small ice cream scoop with moderate success.  I felt that the shapes were a bit off, but for me it’s all about how it tastes. 

The oil, canola this time, had to be heated to 350F.  I have a ThermoPop 2 probe thermometer (highly, highly recommend!), but what I didn’t have is a pot clip to hold the thermometer into the oil without having the thermometer fall in.  A quick DIY solution for me was using a binder clip, but this only sort of worked, if the binder clip prong slipped a bit it’d drop the probe onto the bottom of the Dutch oven giving a false reading. So I had to keep readjusting it so it’d stay relatively accurate. 

Frying was probably the easiest part of the experience.  I dropped in about 1 tbsp sized balls of dough into the oil and let them do their thing, about 45 seconds or so on each side if the size was right. Sometimes I tried to hastily load my ice cream scoop and ended up with a giant ball of dough that took longer to fry up.

All in all I ended up with about 2 dozen doughnut holes.  They were crispy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside.  They tasted like the fresh ones you’d get at the state fair.  I think I’ll make these again, but I do want to branch out and try other fried doughs like Indian fry bread, beignets, and Italian zeppole.

Recipe: https://www.justataste.com/easy-homemade-glazed-doughnut-holes-recipe/

Note: I did not make the glaze as specified in the recipe. I opted to just roll the slightly cooled doughnut holes in some granulated sugar.

Pictures

Some of the doughnut holes after frying

Doughnut holes after rolling in granulated sugar

For my birthday my family got me some lovely silicone muffin/cupcake cups.  They’ve just been collecting dust on my utility shelf so I figured I’d make some muffins with them.  I have plenty of chocolate chips so I figured some double chocolate muffins were in order.

This was a super simple recipe since it’s essentially cake batter with some extra leavening.  I mixed the dry ingredients, adding some extra chocolate chips for the wife and then mixed up the wet ingredient, combined the two and –bam- muffin batter done.

The hard part for me was finding something to evenly spoon the batter into the cups.  Normally you can use an ice cream scoop, spoon, or a piping bag but I really had none of those. Scouring my utensil drawer I found something that worked quite well, the plastic scoop that came with a container of protein powder. Two scoops of that per cup was near perfect.  I also had leftover batter that I didn’t want to freeze, refrigerate, or discard it so I also got a chance to use my mini-loaf pan for the first time as well and make a couple mini chocolate chocolate chip loaves.

After baking for about 25 minutes they came out perfectly.  They were super chocolate-y, moist, springy, and overall perfect for my wife and I.  I used a bit of turbinado sugar on top for just a bit of crunch and it worked nicely.  Definitely a ‘make again’ recipe

Recipe: https://thebusybaker.ca/best-ever-double-chocolate-muffins/

Pictures:

Ingredients. Milk and eggs not shown

Silicone cups prepped for baking

Dry ingredients mixed

Wet ingredients mixed

Muffins ready for baking

Muffins finished baking

Bonus: chocolate chocolate chip mini loaves

I hope the holidays were good to everyone.  Mine were pretty quiet. One Christmas gift I got was a set of silicone doughnut molds.  It was a surprise gift as I really wasn’t thinking of making doughnuts anytime soon since I’m not entirely comfortable frying doughnuts yet.  However, in a bolt of inspiration I realized you can make cake doughnuts in the oven so I looked around for a good chocolate doughnut recipe and I found one.

The recipe itself was basically a chocolate cake recipe but instead of putting the batter into a cake pan you pipe it into the doughnut molds.  This was the first time I’d ever used a piping bag for anything.  The batter was easy to make, the real challenge was the piping. I put a wide tip in to the bag (I think it’s like A8 size) and cut the end off and secured the tip.  I poured in my batter which was wasn’t viscous enough to not start immediately coming out of the piping bag tip so I think a future change will be to put some kind of paper towel plug or something to stop that from happening.  I probably lost a doughnut or two’s worth of batter to it just running out.   Once I got a handle on piping I piped 10 nice doughnuts into the mold.  What’s nice about the batter is it pretty much settles itself so not much tapping to get air bubbles out.

The doughnuts came out great, they smelled chocolately, and my wife stole one and said it was very chocolatey, so goal accomplished.  I made a ganache-like icing of chocolate to dip them in and once the icing set I had a super-rich chocolate doughnut.  These were the epitome of chocolate, a deep rich flavor that made my wife and I immediately want to go back for another one!

Recipe: https://thecookiedoughdiaries.com/chocolate-mini-donuts/#wprm-recipe-container-6699

Pictures:

Ingredients (butter and eggs not shown)

Mixing the two sugars, oil, vanilla, and egg together

Wet ingredients fully mixed

Dry ingredients added

Doughnut batter completed

Doughnut molds greased

Doughnuts ready to bake

Doughnuts completed, unglazed

Doughnuts glazed with added chocolate sprinkles

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!  I completed the first half of my holiday bakes yesterday-gingerbread cookies!  It’s the perfect holiday cookie, that spicy/sweet blend of ginger, molasses, brown sugar, and the trinity of allspice, cloves, and cinnamon.

This bake was a two-parter since I made the dough on one day and then baked it on the next.  It’s important to let gingerbread dough chill since it’s a sticky dough that can crack and crumble easily if you don’t give it a rest.  My old nemesis creaming popped up in this recipe but this time it’s just mixing softened butter until it’s creamy and not needing to cream butter and sugar together—at least not in the usual way.  After creaming the butter I added the molasses, which was as strong as onions to my nose-phew- and the brown sugar.  With the molasses added, the brown sugar mixed easily into that gingerbread colored mixture.  I added the dry ingredients in 1/3 batches until it was all incorporated.

The dough initially was very sticky and a bit crumbly.  I ‘kneaded’ it a bit to combine everything and work out the residual flour from the dough and then cut the dough in half to make two discs of gingerbread dough.  The most challenging thing about this was getting the plastic wrap out and wrapping these discs.  I hate plastic wrap

After letting the dough chill over night, I rolled out the dough, cut them using Christmas shape cookie cutters and baked them.  My first bake I went for 9 minutes and the cookies were a bit too crispy for my liking so for the next batches I reduced the bake time to 7 1/2 minutes per batch and that seemed to be the sweet spot.  The edges were just starting to crisp up with the rest being a nice soft cookie.  The ginger hits you first with that spiciness and then the sweetness of the molasses and brown sugar blend with the holiday spices for a perfect gingerbread cookie.  Owing to time and skill these cookies are undecorated but I will definitely try that when I make another batch of them.

Recipe: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/best-gingerbread-cookies/

Pictures:

Ingredients (Vanilla extract not shown)

Dry ingredients whisked together

Butter creamed with molasses and brown sugar added

Mixture combined with egg and vanilla added

Gingerbread dough discs ready for chilling

First tray of gingerbread cookies completed

All gingerbread cookies on the cooling rack

Happy Holidays to everyone! I’m preparing to do some holiday baking this weekend and next weekend, can’t wait to see how it turns out! A couple weeks ago, I made my first no-bake-ish pie, a delectable chocolate mousse pie with an Oreo crust.  It was truly decadent and definitely worthy of several more preparations.

I’d never made chocolate mousse before so I was pretty excited to try.  First I used my blender to pulse some Oreos into finer pieces and then in a bowl I mixed them with some melted butter.  From there I patted the Oreos into a 9” springform pan and then popped it into the oven for just 5 minutes (which is why I call this no bake-ish ).

While my crust was cooling I made the ganache for the mousse.  Since I’ve had plenty of experience making microwave chocolate ganache, I used this method again.  The ganache came together and was set aside to cool a bit.  Next I made the mousse.  This was the most laborious part, beating the heavy cream until it formed stiff peaks took a long time. Also my first mixing bowl was way too small so the heavy cream was flying everywhere.  Once it looked good I folded in the ganache and soon had a lovely chocolate mousse made.  My wife enjoyed cleaning up the bowls after this . 

The final step was to spread the mousse into the crust and even it out with an offset spatula.  I put it in the refrigerator to chill for a few hours to set a bit.  Afterwards I took it out and took off the springform, what I had was one good looking pie!  The flavor was dynamite, it was so rich and chocolately.  I loved it, my wife loved it, we probably could’ve eaten the entire thing in one helping, it was that good.

Recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/16956/death-by-chocolate-mousse/

Pictures

Ingredients

Oreo crumbled and combined with melted butter

Oreo crust made in the springform pan

Ganache ingredients before heating

Ganache after being heated and combined thoroughly

Beginning of the mousse

Heavy cream made into whipped cream, ready for the ganache

Chocolate mousse completed

Pie ready for chilling

Slice of pie after chilling for a few hours