In the words of Homer Simpson...

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm....doughnuts.

Homemade Vanilla Bean Glazed Doughnuts

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.  Thankfully, I no longer have a fear of frying, so I was pretty excited about this challenge!

Now, here in Canada, doughnuts are pretty popular, though I didn't realize just how popular - apparently Canucks consume more doughnuts per capita than anyone else.  Maybe these stats include those incredibly addictive mini-doughnuts that you get at every summer carnival, festival and fair - hot and freshly sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, they are wickedly good.  I can guarantee you that included in their count is the Canadian institution that is Tim Hortons.  Tim Horton was a hockey player (which automatically makes him a Canadian hero), who opened up a doughnut shop in 1964 with a business partner.  Today, there are over 2700 Tim Hortons locations across Canada (don't ask me why they dropped the apostrophe "s"), almost 600 in the US, and because "Tim's" is such a Canadian staple, there is even a location at the Kandahar Military Base in Afghanistan, simply to keep our troops well supplied with doughnuts and coffee.  Ironically, they're known more for their coffee than anything else these days, and if you don't believe me, next time you run into a Canadian, just ask them what a "Double Double" is, and they'll be able to tell you.  It's pretty well known that if you can get your hands on a Tim Hortons franchise, you basically have a license to print money.  Heck, at the location a block away from my work, the drive through lineup is never less a dozen cars.  While I won't go out of my way for some Tim's, I've definitely eaten there.

Mmmmmm... Doughnuts.  Chocolate, glazed or rolled in sugar!

Lori's challenge gave us the freedom to make whatever kind of doughnuts we wanted, but she provided some recipes for both cake and yeast doughnuts.  I decided to go with the more traditional yeast doughnut recipe by Alton Brown.  Party because I prefer them over cake doughnuts, and partly out of loyalty to Mr. Brown - without him, I would probably still be doing heat-'n-eat food for dinner every night.  His "Good Eats" show was a favourite of mine when hubby and I first moved in together and my cooking skills were basic at best.  His entertaining food science approach was very inspiring, and I would head into the kitchen with a "Hey, I can make that!" attitude after every episode.  It wasn't long before my cooking repertoir expanded considerably.  So, on behalf on myself and my hubby - Thanks Alton!  Now, where was I...? Oh yeah - yeast doughnuts.  Anyway, I was pondering the possibilities of all things doughnut and started thinking about French Crullers, my personal favourite in the doughnut category.  But they're completely different from all other doughnuts... they're not yeast, and they're certainly not cake - they are incredibly light and have an airy, yet moist, custard-y interior.  Well I was able to find out (thanks Google!) that crullers are actually made from pâte à choux dough - which is awesome, because I totally know how to make that! It also explains why they're my fav... pâte à choux dough is the wonderous stuff that éclairs, chouquettes and profiteroles are made from.  It's like wonder dough!

Frying up some French Crullers

Fresh French Crullers... ready to be glazed

The yeast doughnuts do take longer to make, simply because yeast doughs need time to rise and rest and rise again, but you can still have fresh, homemade doughnuts in a little under 3 hours. Conveniently though, there is just enough time while the yeast dough rises to make the crullers.  French Crullers are pretty straightforward: make the choux dough, pipe it into a swirly dough shape using a star tip and a piping bag, and fry.  When they come out of the hot oil you can glaze them or roll them in sugar, plain or seasoned with a spice of your choice, such as cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg... pretty much anything you like!  As for the yeast doughnuts, you can really go crazy with toppings, glazes and even fillings - just remember to omit cutting a hole in the doughnut if you're going to fill them.  I opted to make a vanilla glaze using confectioners sugar, vanilla and cream - and it paired perfectly with the crispy dough.  I also made a ganache to use a rish chocolate glaze for some of them.  Finally, I pureed some strawberry preserves and piped them into the few hole-less doughnuts I cooked up, and used the vanilla glaze on them as well.  A word of advice if you're going to make filled doughnuts: be careful not to overstuff them with your filling.  I sent the filled ones off to work with hubby with the warning that folks should watch out for the exploding doughnut.  I'm pretty sure one of his coworkers started their day off with a strawberry stain down the front of their shirt... oops!

Homemade Jelly Doughnuts - what could be better?

So, having made my own doughnuts from scratch, crullers are still my favourite, though the other ones are way better than store bought.  I can also say that I will certianly be making these again - to fill a request from my nephew in California.  He spent many mornings going for "doughjeez" with his grandpa when he lived in Canada, and he is bona-fide doughnut lover.  Unfortunately, we recently discovered he has a severe allergy to soy, and Sis has yet to find a doughnut they can buy down there that is soy-free.  So I'll happily cook up a fresh batch for him at Christmas.  After all, one of my favourite things about cooking and baking is making someone's day by making their favouite treat - especially if they are otherwise deprived of it.

Sweet, warm & waiting to be devoured....

Happy doughnut making!

Yeast Doughnuts
Recipe courtesy Alton Brown
Makes 20 to 25 doughnuts

360 1 1/2 cups milk
2 1/2 ounces vegetable shortening, approximately 1/3 cup
2 packages instant yeast
1/3 cup warm water (95 to 105 degrees F)
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
23 ounces all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting surface
Vegetable oil, for frying (1 to 1/2 gallons, depending on fryer)

Directions:
Place the milk in a medium saucepan and heat over medium heat just until warm enough to melt the shortening. Place the shortening in a bowl and pour warmed milk over. Set aside.

In a small bowl, sprinkle the yeast over the warm water and let dissolve for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, pour the yeast mixture into the large bowl of a stand mixer and add the milk and shortening mixture, first making sure the milk and shortening mixture has cooled to lukewarm. Add the eggs, sugar, salt, nutmeg, and half of the flour. Using the paddle attachment, combine the ingredients on low speed until flour is incorporated and then turn the speed up to medium and beat until well combined. Add the remaining flour, combining on low speed at first, and then increase the speed to medium and beat well. Change to the dough hook attachment of the mixer and beat on medium speed until the dough pulls away from the bowl and becomes smooth, approximately 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer to a well-oiled bowl, cover, and let rise for 1 hour or until doubled in size.

On a well-floured surface, roll out dough to 3/8-inch thick. Cut out dough using a 2 1/2-inch doughnut cutter or pastry ring and using a 7/8-inch ring for the center whole. Set on floured baking sheet, cover lightly with a tea towel, and let rise for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oil in a deep fryer or Dutch oven to 365 degrees F. Gently place the doughnuts into the oil, 3 to 4 at a time. Cook for 1 minute per side. Transfer to a cooling rack placed in baking pan. Allow to cool for 15 to 20 minutes prior to glazing, if desired.

Pâte à Choux
makes approximately 12 French Crullers

125 ml milk
125 ml water
125g unsalted butter
4g salt
140g all-purpose flour
4 large eggs (at room temperature)

Place the milk, water and butter into a small saucepan and heat over medium heat. Once the butter has completely melted, add in the flour and stir vigorously, scraping the bottom of the pan, until the dough is well mixed and resembles the texture of wet sand.
Place the dough into the bowl of a food processor (or stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment). Turn the food processor on to cool the mixture for a couple of minutes. With the processor running, add the eggs, one at a time, through the feed tube. Scrape down the bowl if necessary, and continue to process until the dough becomes thick and glossy.
Scrape the dough into a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip.  Gently pipe large circles of dough onto a sheet of parchment paper sprinkled generously with flour.
Preheat the oil in a deep fryer or Dutch oven to 365˚F. Gently place the doughnuts into the oil, 2 or 3 at a time.  Cook for about 1 minute per side.  Remove from oil and place onto a cooling rack.  Allow them to cool slightly before dipping in glaze or dipping in sugar.

The incredible exploding doughnut

Vanilla Bean Glaze
60ml (1/4 Cup) heavy cream
1 Tbsp vanilla bean paste (or you can substitute with vanilla extract)
205g (1 1/2 Cups) confectioner's sugar

In a medium bowl, combine the cream and vanilla.  Gently whisk in one third of the confectioners sugar until well blended.  Gradually blend in the rest of the confectioners sugar, 1/3 at a time, whisking until smooth.

Dip the warm doughnuts into the glaze, and coat completely.  Lift the doughnut out of the glaze by threading a skewer, dowell or the handle of a wooden spoon through the hole of the doughnut.  Suspend the doughnuts over the bowl for a couple of minutes to allow the excess glaze to drip off.  Transfer the glazed doughnuts to a plate, platter or tray.  Serve immediately.

Give 'em a dip in some Vanilla Bean Glaze

Almost ready to eat.....!

Brioche... My Nemesis. Part I

Baking inspiration is all around me, and every where I look these days, I'm being inspired to make brioche.  Magazines, menus, blogs... I can take a hint - brioche is begging to be made!  So, after a less than spectacular day where anything and everything seemed to go awry, I came home and set about making some delicious, rich, buttery bread for hubby and I to enjoy in the morning.  I admit, it was an ambitious task for me to attempt when the universe was working against me.  BAH!  Mind over matter!  Suck it up, princess!  Get crackin' on that bread!!!

Did I mention that I've never made brioche before?  Not that it matters - I don't scare easily in the kitchen.  There's a first time for everything.

I thumbed through half a dozen different cookbooks, trying to decide which recipe was best.  I wanted a fairly large recipe, so that I would have something to share with the gang at work on Monday, and since they all looked pretty similar, I grabbed the recipe with the biggest yield and started gathering ingredients.  I made the yeast sponge, and set it aside to do it's fat & happy yeast dance and get all puffy, while I measured out flour and butter.  Flour, eggs and sponge all went into the mixer bowl and the dough hook began twirling around.  So far so good.  After a couple of minutes, I peeked into the bowl and saw a big heavy gob of dough was clinging for dear life to the dough hook and there was a *lot* of dry ingredients still sitting at the bottom.  Hmmm... that's weird.  I checked the recipe again - no mention of such a phenomenon.  I stuck my hand in the bowl and gave the stiff dough a couple of kneads by hand, making my best effort to incorporate the dry flour.  It seemed to improve a bit, so I turned the mixer back on and let it work the dough for another couple of minutes.  There wasn't a lot of improvement, but I decided that perhaps the next step would help: "cover the bowl with a moist towel and let it rest for 20 minutes".  That left me 20 minutes to try and problem solve.  That's when I noticed all of the other recipes called for milk, but the one I was working with did not.  I did think it slightly odd at first - in fact, when gathering ingredients to get started, I grabbed the carton of milk, expecting it would be needed - after all, I was making brioche, a bread well known for it's richness due to all the butter and eggs and milk involved.  But I saw it was nowhere in the ingredient list and put it back in the fridge.  Now, however, the absence of milk was making me suspicious... I re-read the entire recipe another three times, looking for something I had missed.  After all, this was a book written by a highly-respected chef and cooking instructor - *I* had obviously skipped a step or messed up somehow.  Nope, I had done everything the recipe had asked me to.  Something was just not right....... 

Twenty minutes were up, so I removed the damp towel, poked the still-stiff dough, shrugged my shoulders and turned the mixer back on.  Minutes passed but nothing changed.  Frustrated, I pulled the failed batch of dough from the mixer, threw it into a greased bowl and set it aside to do whatever it was going to do... magically become a soft, chewy "surprise bread", or a new stepping stone for the garden perhaps - who knew?

Still somewhat convinced that I had simply screwed up the recipe, I went back to square one and started on batch number two.  Batch two was going about as well as batch one.  Annoyed, I grabbed the computer and googled the cookbook title and "typo" to see if perhaps I was not the only person who had encountered problems with this particular recipe.  Bingo.  I was not alone.  Amazon even had a couple of reviews that mentioned typos in this book - not in the brioche recipe specifically, but a couple of others.  I was no longer simply frustrated - I was mad.  I felt betrayed.  This was a highly recommended cookbook!  It had quotes of praise on the sleeve from the likes of Flo Braker and Dorie Greenspan... how could this book have gone to print with what was turning out to be numerous error, typos and ingredient omissions?

We're all human, and we all make mistakes.  I am not immune, and neither are chefs or people in the publishing industry, but I imagine that cookbooks likely go through a number of edits, re-edits, recipe testing, another edit, more testing... all in the name of quality control for a product your are putting out there with your name (and reputation) on the line.  They're certainly not immune to typo's either - in fact there was recent chatter about a very expensive cookbook typo (like, I'm talking $20K expensive), because one of the recipes called for "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of pepper.  Ouch!  Anyway - still peeved, I quickly turned to the front of the book and read the acknowledgement page: "much appreciation goes to XX, my copy editor, for her amazing attention to detail, as well as to proofreader XX...."  All I could do was laugh and wonder to myself if Chef still felt this way - or was he even aware of the errors in his book?  Surely the publisher would be correcting these errors and re-printing soon.  I was also alarmed at web reviews of the book that said it would be "perfect for the beginner" - ya sure, if you want them to give up baking forever because of horrible failures that are not their fault!  Once corrected, however, it really will be a great book for beginners, but not in it's current state.

Anyway, 10 eggs and 6 cups of flour into my attempts for warm, rich brioche, all I could do was shake my head and started calculating.  I scanned the other recipes I had and compared the ratios of ingredients for each.  From what I could tell, 1/2 cup should be approximately how much milk should be in the recipe I had - though I knew I wasn't adding it at the right stage of the recipe.  Oh well, I had nothing left to lose at this point, and it was past 11 pm...I was clearly NOT going to be having brioche with my morning coffee. 

Milk went in, mixer on, and I started cleaning the kitchen.  Every minute or so, I checked on the dough, and eventually, it began to look the way a proper dough should look.  I accepted this small victory, transferred the dough from the mixer to a buttered bowl and put it in the fridge for the night.  Exhausted, I loaded the dishwasher, wiped the counters and went to bed.

Day 2

I awoke this morning, refreshed and optimistic.  It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and I had slept well.   I made a quick trip to the store for more eggs and yeast before hubby headed out for the day, then the pups and I set out for a nice long walk to Starbucks for some coffee & sunshine.  Returning home with two tired dogs meant I could bake in peace.  The first step was to select a different recipe to use - the last thing I wanted was a repeat of last night.  As extra insurance, I read through it twice before gathering my ingredients and getting started.  I also removed the two failed batches of dough from the fridge and let them rest on the counter - after all without baking them, I couldn't accurately judge how badly they turned out.  

For batch 3, I began by combining the flour and yeast, then adding the sugar, milk and eggs and set the dough hook into action.  As the dough came together, it was looking mildly better than either of my previous attempts, but it still would not come together as one cohesive mass.  I rested the dough under a damp towel before incorporating the butter.  The butter was the recommended temperature, but the it never seemed to actually incorporate with the dough so much as coat the outside of the dough and break the dough apart into smaller chunks.  I scraped down the dough hook and bowl and turned the mixer back on, but nothing changed.  At this point, I could see a dark cloud creeping into my sunshiny good day.  Three more times, I scraped everything down and put the mixer through it's paces, but the only progress being made was that the bowl on my mixer was gradually becoming wrenched tighter and tighter onto the base - to the point that when I wanted to remove the bowl I couldn't.  Nothing I did could wrench the bowl free from the stand - I finally had to call hubby in to help.  Even then, it took the pair of us to finally pry it loose!

I worked the dough by hand in attempt to get it into one cohesive mass again, but no luck.  I returned the bowl to the mixer one final time, turned the mixer on medium and let the darn thing run.  Minutes later, I turned to see that my mixer was shimmying its way to the edge of the counter.   I pulled the machine back into place and scraped the dough hook down once more - see, I can be a bit stubborn sometimes, and there was no way I was going to be defeated by brioche!  About 15 minutes later, my poor mixer whining away and in danger of over-heating, the dough was finally starting to come together... HA!  Take THAT brioche!  I grabbed the ball of dough and set it on the counter beside my now-baked Batch #1, and my hand-kneaded Batch #2 (which was looking pretty good actually).  I started to work Batch #3 a bit by hand, just enough to get it into a smooth mound ready for a nice snooze in a bowl.  Only it never became a smooth mound.  It was smooth-ish dough with hunks of un-buttered dough dispersed throughout.  It honestly looked like my dough had warts!  And they just peeled away from the smooth dough.  It was pretty clear to me at this point that brioche and I were clearly not meant to be in anything more than a one-sided relationship.  I could be in love with brioche, but brioche was only going to smile politely and keep it's distance from me.  I could picture the scene in my head; brioche giving me the old "it's not you, it's me" routine... ya, sure, Brioche.  Whatever, at least have the decency to be straight with me!

At this point I shot a short video and sent it out to my food blog friends in Twitter-land.  A baking 911 call for help.  Batch #1 was in fact going to make a great stepping stone for the garden - rock hard.  Batch #2 was looking somewhat promising, and the warty science experiment that Batch #3 had become.  Meanwhile, I took #2 and tucked it into various sized molds for baking, put it into the oven and headed for a shower.  It was beginning to look like I wasn't even going to have warm brioche tomorrow morning... grrrrrrrrr.

Much to my surprise, #2 came from the oven and looked quite promising.  It certainly looked like the real deal.  It wasn't even rock hard like #1, it may even be edible!  The only way to tell for sure was to rip open one of the small brioche à têtes and give it a taste.  hmmmm.... well, not surprisingly, it was obvioulsy not the deliciously sweet brioches I had tasted in France, but it *was* edible.  Maybe with a bit of strawberry jam or cinnamon butter, it could pass.  No one would be repulsed by it, but this was merely a consolation prize for all my hard work. 

I won't give up.  In fact, the fabulous Cecilia over at OneVanillaBean, who has a nice batch of brioche resting on her counter, is making some notes for those of us who are clearly not up to snuff in brioche's eyes.  Hopefully I learn the tricks I need from her, maybe then I can win brioche's heart.  Fingers crossed.

One thing I know for certain;  It ain't over, Brioche.  You may have won the battle, but you will not win the war!

Now I'm going to go put some cookies in the oven, just to prove to myself that I *can* bake....