This year Tax Day was Monday April 18th, a cold and dreary and depressingly rainy day. Or: perfect for the long hours at the kitchen table, working through all the forms and documentation and instructions and calculations. Once it is all done and dropped off at the post office, my thoughts turn to how best to reward those labors, which is often with some wonderful baking endeavor in mind. The next day, Tuesday, I got busy with a new recipe: fried glazed cinnamon roll doughnuts.
The dough rose wonderfully.
Just like regular cinnamon rolls, you spread the cinnamon-brown sugar filling onto the dough and roll it up and cut the rounds for rolls.
They also rose up well.
The fallacy in the recipe or the foolishness in my approach resides in this simple dilemma: how in the world would a cinnamon-sugar filling stand up to deep frying? So the first rolls unraveled and shed their sweet internal goodness into the frying oil.
The later ones held up better when I tried to pinch all the dough a bit tighter. The simple vanilla glaze was quite good. These rascals were something! For my 14th attempt at some form of cinnamon roll, according to my blog entries, this one was a unique belly-pleaser.
My experience with doughnuts is limited, at least from the standpoint of making them. I tried Krispy Kreme copycats back in 2014, and I made Cro-Nuts in 2020. I've also tried my hand twice at beignets, once back before building the new kitchen and again in 2013.
Wait: there's more! I made a base for vanilla ice milk and churned it the next morning so that it would set up by that Wednesday evening...
...at which time I heated up a skillet, put some pats of butter in it, sliced a couple of the remaining cinnamon roll doughnuts, and griddled them to a chewy toasted gloriousness, so that I could add more of the glaze and then top them with scoops of that creamy vanilla ice milk. This let me approximate the "grillswith" dessert popular at the University Diner, the White Spot, and the former Sloan's in Charlottesville, where I lived in the late 1990s. (A fuller related blog post can be found here.) Oh. My. Gosh. A. Maze. Zing.
Based on "Dunkin Style Cinnamon Rolls," from Nazeeha Khan of My Secret Bakes.
"Simplest Vanilla Glaze," by Mark and Michael Klebeck with Jess Thomson. In Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts: Secrets and Recipes for the Home Baker. San Francisco: Chronicle Books (2011), p. 132.
"Classic Vanilla Ice Milk," by Stella Parks, Pastry Wizard of SeriousEats.com. [Published 22 August 2018 / Updated 15 April 2020]
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