National Donut Day

It's been a while since I managed to meet the moment of a "National Day of..." But last Friday was National Donut Day, observed the first Friday of June, and I had a recipe that looked perfect for how my time was working out late that afternoon. Take a gander at these marvelous glazed yeast doughnuts, with an Amish spin, that turned out just about perfect. Fresh and hot, well-coated in a sweet vanilla glaze, I'd consumed two in short order and then spent the evening knowing I'm a weak man.

The storm that blew up on us just after I'd passed two doughnuts over to our neighbors was anything but weak: the rush of water down the street, the flashes of lightning, the roll of thunder, the ominous darkness that beat the dusk into submission: while technically we are still in late spring, let's call it the first great storm of the summer.

Lots of water came down, but not as much as my college roommate Jimmy endured the day before in Sanford, when his office parking lot flooded after about 4 inches of rain fell and his Honda CRV ended up submerged.

Our radar here shows it was small in scope but intense in packed punch:

And good lord: what a bald spot this old man is sporting nowadays:

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"Amish Donuts," from Julie Clark. From Tastes of Lizzy T. [Published 01 June 2024]

Vanilla & Chocolate Custard Doughnuts

The compulsion to try interesting yeasted constructions continues, and the week before last, I made my first attempt at custard-filled doughnuts.

It began Wednesday with making a batch of vanilla custard, and then a batch of chocolate custard. Then, on Thursday, I hand-kneaded from start to finish the dough for the doughnuts. By the time the dough had risen and rested, I divided them up and they puffed up a bit more, albeit a bit more spherical than one might want.

Then I fried 'em up and rolled half in powdered sugar and the other half in a cocoa-sugar mix. I filled a few to start with, just to see how they'd be, and got to sample one of each.

Given how oozy they were, I decided that the remaining ones would be just as good if I'd split them and use the custard as toppings. It was all going to the same place anyway, right?

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From "Custard Cream Donuts (Vanilla & Chocolate)," from HidaMari's YouTube channel. [Posted 18 June 2021]

Glazed Cinnamon Roll Doughnuts

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.

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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.

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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]

Cro-Roe-Nuts

Oh, those damnable blue slips in the quarantine task jar! Last Saturday, with the morning coffee drawing time, a third blue in a row was pulled from the random collection of chores and tasks! This time it compelled me to try making cronuts for the first time, that magical hybrid of croissant and fried doughnut created by Soho pastry chef extraordinaire, Dominique Ansel.

But I did not try to follow his recipe and I sure didn't want this to be a three-day ordeal. Instead, I came across a two-part video on allrecipes.com that made it all doable in a day.

In the vein of the remarkable yeast glazed doughnuts of hometown favorite Krispy Kreme, but with a satisfying crispy crunch on the outside and airy tender croissant-style dough within, and dipped in a perfect helping of vanilla glaze...these took the place of dinner that night.

As for the doughnut holes? I popped them into a pile of cinnamon sugar when I took them out of the fryer. Unfortunately, while they were still pretty darned good, that helped them to hold on to too much of their external grease.

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"How To Make Cronuts, Part I," from Chef John of FoodWishes.com. Posted to allrecipes.com.

"How To Make Cronuts, Part II," from Chef John of FoodWishes.com. Posted to allrecipes.com.

Griddled Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and Coffee Ice Cream

When fellow Wake Forest University alum Jason Miller was here at the end of last week, we made a quest for old time's sake to catch Hot Doughnuts Now at the Krispy Kreme on Stratford Road...just like back in our late 1980s WFU days. Jason also gifted me with a bag of Iron Bell coffee from Louisville, and I used some of it to make coffee ice cream over the weekend. Because I spent five years in Charlottesville while completing my PhD at the University of Virginia, I had become familiar with a wonderful and unique dessert known as the "grills with" [some say "Grillswith"]. These three relatively disconnected thoughts will make sense when you consider that stale doughnuts, coffee ice cream, and Charlottesville memories were successfully combined this past Sunday night into an absolutely incredible dessert of a griddled doughnut with coffee ice cream on top.

While the University Diner and the White Spot were best known for making this concoction famous, I think I only ever had it at the now-defunct Sloan's Restaurant, which used to be behind Barracks Road Shopping Center on Millmont. The Charlottesville experience has translated into portability for this dessert, to Richmond, Memphis, New York City, and New Orleans. It's something that'll stick with you, once you've had it, and I felt I had no choice but to be inspired by it...especially since there are never any doughnuts at the house.

Except the glazed ones I made one time...

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Inspiration for griddling—rather than grilling—the doughnuts came from Darron of Graphique Couture.

"Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream," by David Lebovitz. In The Perfect Scoop. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press (2007), p. 35.

Homemade Krispy Kreme Glazed Doughnuts

If memory serves, it was when I was vegging out on the road in some hotel room that led me to stumble across this "how-to" for a pretty good approximation of Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts. That put it on my radar but it took until the last weekend of July before I was willing and motivated to tackle it. Here are some of the pictures I snagged along the way:

After the first rise, and that's my largest bowl!

Yes: I have a doughnut cutter.

Ready for the second rise.

Frying 'em up in peanut oil at 350F.

Crispy and golden!

With a perfect sweet glaze.
(I ate three for dessert that night.)

To me, working with yeast dough, this was a heckuva thing to decide I wanted to make for dessert on top of the dinner I was already preparing. And it made dinner mighty late that night (9:30 pm, to be exact) but fresh hot homemade glazed Krispy Kreme-esque doughnuts for dessert? Absolutely worth it. Amazing. Delicious. I want more.

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"Krispy Kreme Donut Recipe," from scoochmaroo. Recipe online at Instructables.com.

Baked Cinnamon Sugar Doughnuts

When education colleague, friend, and fellow CRISS trainer Jeremy Craft came down for a visit this past weekend, he did not come empty-handed: he brought the Roediger House a gift of doughnut pans.

He then insisted I put them to use before he headed home the following Sunday morning.

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"Baked Doughtnuts Three Ways," from King Arthur Flour. Recipe found online.

Snow Day!

I was scheduled today to be working over in Summerfield, north of Greensboro, to do the second day of training with the second cohort of the Piedmont Triad Leadership Academy. Alas, there was a winter event in the region yesterday evening, so it was a snow day!

Last night, while the snow was still falling (Winston-Salem only got about an inch and a half, and it was a pretty wet snow following several days of cold dreary rain), I snapped a few shots of the house and the vicinity of the 4th and Spring Streets intersection:

Today, with this unanticipated day off, I thought I'd make a special treat: New Orleans beignets, using a recipe I'd not tried before:

I fixed Vietnamese coffee to go along with it. This is only my second try at beignets and I'm pretty sure I liked the previous one much better (which was back in the days of the old kitchen, actually).

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"New Orleans Beignets," in Cook's Country, February/March 2013, p. 6-7.