Apple Cider Doughnuts

Friday, June 4^th was International Doughnut Day. As I read about International Doughnut Day on various websites, I got to thinking that trying to make doughnuts at home might be a really interesting challenge. Especially for someone like me, who refuses (at least so far) to buy yeast and does not have any frying experience or equipment.

I started searching for recipes, and found one simply called “Easy Doughnuts” from RealSimple.com. Perfect, I thought. It didn’t require heavy duty frying, and the dough could be bought pre-made at the grocery store—Pillsbury Grands, they suggested. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that frying a pre-made biscuit wasn’t really what I was looking to do. A Pillsbury Grand just doesn’t equal a doughnut, in my book, no matter what you do to it.

I found a few other recipes that involved yeast, which were nixed right away: I’m still afraid of the price tag and lack of user-friendliness. I finally found a winner from, where else, Smitten Kitchen. It didn’t involve scary yeast, but still looked to have all of the makings of a good, classic doughnut. And, I had never had an apple cider doughnut before.

The Recipe

Apple Cider Doughnuts, SmittenKitchen.com

Apprehension Meter

The meter ran medium-high for this recipe. I was 100% new to the frying world, and had visions of apartment fires and grease burns dancing in my head. On a less grave note, even though this dough didn’t require yeast or time to rise or anything complicated, for some reason, working with dough is always a little intimidating for me.

No really fancy or expensive ingredients needed for this recipe

I also lacked a few of the utensils. I don’t own any cookie cutters, and the Bed Bath & Beyond down the street only sold huge tubs of them for $20. No thanks. I also only own one baking sheet, instead of the required two, but this has never proved to be a serious problem. You just have to be a little crafty with space, and maybe a little more flexible with time, depending on the recipe.

And finally, I don’t own a candy thermometer, and didn’t feel like buying one, considering I never fry food. Having the oil the right temperature might seem like a very important thing—and it is—but I felt like being a rebel and “going with my instincts.” Something I probably shouldn’t do in the kitchen…not quite yet.

Here’s How It Really Went

There are few things, I think, more gratifying and annoying than making your first batch of homemade doughnuts. What I was rewarded with was a very stinky apartment, but a tasty, warm, and moist batch of doughnuts and doughnut holes.

Apple cider, reducing

Be warned: The whole recipe took me about two hours, from start to finish. I’m not sure if this is because I am a novice doughnut maker, but I didn’t realize it would take so long. Most of the time was spent waiting while the dough sat in the freezer, then waiting again while the dough chilled in the fridge before frying.

Butter and Sugar

The dough itself, once it all came together, was truly a pleasure to work with. It was unbelievably soft, and while I should have been a little more generous with the flour on the work surface, it didn’t stick to my fingers, the way pizza dough often does.

Not having a cookie cutter turned out to be fine in the end, but it really was a pain trying to cut all of the shapes out with a knife, which was my brilliant plan. It wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming, and I ended up with irregular shapes. I suppose that’s part of the charm of homemade goodies, but I was hoping they’d turn out looking a little nicer.

Even after spreading it out over the parchment paper, this still wasn't enough flour

As I mentioned before, sprinkling quite a bit more flour on the parchment paper before pressing out the dough would have helped me out a lot, or maybe just ensuring that it was spread out more evenly. It was kind of tough to peel the cut shapes out from the dough, and contributed to more incongruities in shape.

Impromptu clearing of the freezer to accommodate the dough

Who would have guessed a ruler would come in handy in the kitchen? I used this to measure out the circumference of my doughnuts.

Once all of the shapes were cut and chilled in the fridge, it was time for the really scary part, the frying. For some reason I had thought that I had had a lot more vegetable oil at home than I really did, and came up about an inch short, but, I had come that far anyway, there was no sense in letting that stop me.

I heated the oil on my stove on medium-high. Heating that much oil is kind of strange, because, unlike water, it doesn’t boil to let you know it’s ready, and unlike having just a little bit of oil in your pan, it doesn’t really ripple when it gets really hot.

I plunked two doughnuts into the oil, and they immediately started frying. They sunk at first, and then bobbed up, turning golden then brown as the oil bubbled excitedly around them. I waited about 60 seconds, and used a slotted spoon to flip them over. About 30 seconds after that, I scooped them out of the oil, and let them rest on a bed of paper towels.

My first two doughnuts were a very dark, almost burnt-looking brown. According to Smitten Kitchen’s photos, apple cider doughnuts look like they are supposed to be somewhat more brown than your typical Krispy Kreme, but these looked a little too brown, and therefore unappealing.

I concluded that the oil was entirely too hot, and turned the burner down to low. I plopped another doughnut in, but this time only let it fry for about 25 seconds on each side. Well, needless to say, that didn’t work out so well either.

My under-cooked experimental doughnut

I finally found the happiest medium I could- about 30-ish seconds on each side, then a few more additional flips, about every 10 seconds.

Of course, if I had just bought the darn candy thermometer, all of this could have been avoided.

While my creations wouldn’t have been able to get by on their good looks alone, they certainly did taste good. I found them to be rich in doughy flavor, and not at all crumbly, as I had worried they might.

While I was frying the doughnuts, I kept wondering how intense the apple flavor would be. I was a little disappointed to find that it wasn’t very intense at all. It was there, slight and quiet, but maybe could have been enhanced had I made the suggested apple glaze to top the doughnuts, rather than the easier way out: cinnamon and sugar.

Would I suggest making these for a weekend brunch? Probably not, unless you have a few hours to spare and don’t care if you and your apartment reek of oil. But, I do plan to try these, or maybe another doughnut recipe again in the future (as soon as I buy a candy thermometer!). The frying part was really, truly fun, for some reason. And the end result is a special treat—hot, fresh, and homemade. Special treats don’t get better than that.

Aunt Anne's Christmas Chicken Surprise, or Apricot Chicken

Hear me out. I know… this photo may not exactly get your mouth watering. And the list of ingredients that make up what you see here doesn’t help its case, either. But, hear me out.

Last December, my Aunt Anne was preparing this dish for our Christmas Eve dinner. I watched as the casserole dish went from the fridge into the oven, and grimaced a little at the rust-colored goo covering the chicken, and at the little, dark solid bits sprinkled throughout.

Once I asked what was on the chicken, I wished I hadn’t. Four ingredients that I barely like on their own—Russian salad dressing, dry French onion soup mix, and apricot preserves—mixed unnaturally together… and now I was going to have to pretend to enjoy eating this, on Christmas Eve no less.

Oh boy, was I in for a surprise.

The unlikely suspects

This turned out to be one of the best-tasting chicken dishes I’ve ever had; I ended up literally scraping my plate clean with my fork, leaving no trace of this delicious sauce behind. It’s not the healthiest (at least two of the ingredients have high fructose corn syrup as one of the first-listed ingredients), and it may not be the most sophisticated, but oh boy- it tastes good.

The Recipe

Aunt Anne’s Christmas Chicken Surprise, or Apricot Chicken

(Apparently this is no family secret; I found several versions of this recipe online. I used one most similar to this.)

Apprehension Meter

The apprehension meter was fairly low for this recipe, simply because I knew the preparation was simple, I knew the ingredients were well-known and cheap, but still, there is just something in your instincts that tells you these ingredients should not taste good together.

I had to try it out for myself to see if I could actually prepare a tasty chicken dish, that didn’t come out dry, tough, and tasteless.

Here’s How It Really Went

I’ve resigned to the fact that I’ll never be able to make chicken as well as my Aunt Anne, but… I have to say, this was pretty darn tasty. Easily one of the best tasting chicken dishes I’ve ever made. Emphasis on the easy.

The instructions for this recipe were incredibly simple, and consisted of simply dumping bottled or jarred contents into a bowl, mixing, then pouring over chicken. Upon my aunt’s recommendation, I added about 1/3 of a can of whole cranberry sauce right before putting the chicken in the oven.

Still doesn't look very appetizing, does it?

It was a nice touch, and the cranberries helped to balance the slightly salty, barbeque-like taste the onion soup and Russian dressing produced. I baked the chicken at 350* for 45 minutes, uncovered.

After the fridge, and before the oven

The final product wasn’t as good as I remembered it on Christmas Eve, but that’s probably because I wasn’t eating it surrounded by family, on a cold winter night. But, for me, I still considered this an accomplishment.

It was easy, fairly quick, and it just tastes really good. I could even see it becoming a Christmas tradition someday when I have a family, but until then, I’ll happily pull this card out of my recipe box whenever I’m in the mood for a simple, comforting, and tasty dish.

Chana Masala

Everyone who needs to eat food to stay alive should know about Smitten Kitchen. Smittenkitchen.com, a home cooking blog written by a quick-witted New York mother of one, not only has recipes that actually sound appetizing and fun to make, but photos that will make you drool all over your desk when you’re visiting her blog during your lunch break at work. Not that I… do that…on a daily basis…

Anyway, I stumbled across this delicious looking dish on her blog last week, and the image of this Indian chickpea tomato stew has been seared into my brain ever since. Today, I decided to give it a try.

The Recipe

Chana Masala, smittenkitchen.com

Apprehension Meter

The meter sat around the medium mark for this recipe- mostly responding to some of the ingredients, rather than any special techniques or equipment. In that department, the recipe is very tame.

But let’s start with this laundry list of spices. Eight spices in one dish?! And what the heck is garam masala? Having to buy this many spices for one recipe is typically where I draw the line and move onto the next recipe.

After taking inventory, I found that I already had two or three of these spices in my pantry, which meant not needing to buy as many at the grocery store. Good. But, it still meant having to buy a bunch of new spices that a) I don’t really have room for in my itty, bitty cupboards, and b) I’d probably use once, and then not again for a long, long time. Bad.

Another ingredient that made me sweat a little was the “fresh, hot green chili pepper.” Within the pepper family, I have only ever cooked with bell peppers, and sometimes even that feels a little exotic. I’m not a huge fan of spicy foods, so when I saw that I’d have to buy a hot green chili pepper, my taste buds burned in anticipation- and not in a good way.

And finally, ginger. Doesn’t sound too scary, does it? Well, have you ever seen ginger? Sitting there all mangled and stumpy? I had seen it used a few times on various cooking shows, and knew that it needed peeling at some point, but that’s where my ginger knowledge ended.

Here’s How It Really Went

Preparing the ingredients for this recipe was pretty easy, and required no special skills or appliances. Everything went more or less according to the plan, with a few hiccups.

Let’s start with the ginger. Like I said, I had minimal instruction on how to deal with this guy. The recipe called for grated ginger. After using a sharp knife to slice off the “skin,” I went into the drawer to get the little cheese grater, and found that it was gone. Note: don’t try to cook a new dish that requires certain tools while your roommate is in the process of packing up her things to move to Michigan. Rookie mistake.

Mangled and stumpy... just how I like 'em.

Instead, I found a vegetable peeler, and tried to hack off little shavings of the ginger. This was frustrating and difficult, and I gave up before I reached the requisite 3 teaspoons. Having a grater would probably have made it easier, but even so, I still wouldn’t recommend using powered ginger (if they even make such a thing). The smell and taste of fresh ginger is really something, and I think is a key component to this dish.

You could say things got a "little dicey..." Yep, I said it.

The second challenge was the tomatoes.

The recipe calls for fresh or canned, and while I would almost always prefer fresh, I think in this case, canned might be better.

The fresh tomatoes basically disintegrated during the cooking process, leaving behind some seeds and skins. Canned tomatoes, I think, would have cooked down much more nicely. Their juice would have contributed well to the stew, and the tomatoes themselves would have broken down nicely, while still retaining some substance.

Onion, garlic, ginger, and little flecks of a green jalapeno pepper, smelling oh so good

And the final dilemma: again, forgetting that my roommate had already packed up her kitchen gadgets, I reached into the drawer for the can opener to open my chickpeas and… gone. And, unless you're MacGyver, finding a replacement tool for a can opener isn’t so easy. This required a pause in the cooking process, a quick run to the CVS down the street—which, luckily, sold can openers—and eight dollars and fifteen minutes later, I was back in action.

My newest kitchen gadget. :)

The final product? Colorful, a tad spicy, full of protein and fiber, but… would I make it again? Probably not in the near future. It was pretty fun to cook, with all of its exotic aromas, but I was disappointed that mine didn’t turn out as rich, thick, and flavorful looking as Smitten Kitchen’s. Either I’m not a very good cook, or she’s way too good at food photography.

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Arugula and Hazelnuts

As Cathy of NotEatingOutInNY.com points out in her introduction to this recipe, these three ingredients are a little obscure. I agreed with her when she wrote that they probably aren’t things you eat very often: sweet potatoes mainly at Thanksgiving and Christmas, arugula thrown incognito into salads, and hazelnuts strictly in Milka chocolate bars (yes, please).

A friend and co-worker happened upon this recipe, which happened to be from one of my favorite food blogs, Not Eating Out in New York. After hearing her very positive review, it seemed like the perfect weekend project. Sweet potato gnocchi. Now that’s scary.

The Recipe

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Arugula and Hazelnuts from NotEatingOutInNY.com

Apprehension Meter

The meter reached a new peak with this recipe. The thought of trying to make any kind of noodle from scratch practically gives me hives, let alone making a noodle out of a potato. I went into this one almost certain that I would end up red-faced, swearing a little, and ordering pizza.

At least there were some easy ingredients to work with in this recipe, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have tried it. The three very basic ingredients in this recipe weren’t a bother. Sweet potatoes = easy. Arugula = easy (although I had never purchased any before making this dish). Hazelnuts = easy, but somewhat spendy.

Here’s How It Really Went

Oy. I didn’t end up red-faced and swearing, and I did finish the dish to completion, but let’s just say I did end up a little rosy-cheeked and distressed. This one was not easy. But I learned a few things that will hopefully help you and your novice cook friends out there.

First off, the recipe calls for one pound of sweet potatoes. I was surprised to learn, while weighing my produce at the grocery store, that this meant one large sweet potato. I had my doubts that one sweet potato would yield four servings of gnocchi. To my surprise, this big guy ended up certainly producing enough for three, maybe even four people.

I sliced the ends of the sweet potato to see its beautiful bright orange color, then plunked it in a pot of boiling water. Unfortunately, the recipe didn’t specify how long to boil the potato. ‘Until tender’ doesn’t mean much to a novice.

I found, doing a little pre-research, that it usually takes about 30 minutes for a boiled sweet potato to become tender. After plunking my little orange friend into the water, I set the timer for 30 minutes. After about 20 minutes had elapsed, I poked it with a fork and found that its skin was easily pierced. How easy! And it even took less time than I had read!

I plucked the potato out of the boiling water with a pair of tongs, peeled it using the tongs (it’s true- the skin does practically slide right off), and slid my knife through the middle, only to be met with a very solid, un-soft, un-cooked inside. Rats.

Unhappily, I added more water to the pot (some had evaporated during the first try), and watched the orange little bits that had fallen off the potato swirl around as the water re-heated into a boil. In went the semi-cooked sweet potato. For nearly 20 more minutes.

By this point, my cheeks were rosy, my living room windows were steaming up, and the whole apartment smelled slightly of baby food.

After pacing impatiently from the kitchen to the living room for 20 minutes (the Oscars were on), I re-plucked the potato from the water, and placed it in a glass bowl, to be mashed with a fork.

Now, the recipe specifically says not to do this, but I didn’t really have another option. In place of a food mill (I wish I knew what that was), the recipe says to press the potato through a strainer with a spatula. My strainer has large sporadic holes, not fine wire mesh, so that wasn’t really an option.

After mashing the potato, I threw in about a ½ cup of flour, which I folded into what was now turning into orange dough.

Another bump in the road: the recipe called for 1 cup of flour. I’m not sure where or how I went wrong, but I ended up using at least two cups just to get the dough to the point where I could form it into balls, then roll it into little logs without it sticking to my hands and everything else. This turned out to be okay. Be liberal with the flour- I found that, for me, it didn’t affect the consistency of the gnocchi a great deal.

The first gratifying moment of this recipe came once I sliced the logs into little bit-sized pieces, and scored them with a fork. They were actually starting to look like gnocchi.

Into another pot of boiling water they went, in two batches, and it was smooth sailing from there on out.

The arugula practically wilted itself, and the hazelnuts were easy to chop.

Once both batches of the gnocchi had been cooked and the arugula was sufficiently wilted, I added the gnocchi to the arugula pan, and sprinkled on the hazelnuts.

And the final product? Not much to look at, but it ended up tasting pretty good. But, I’m not sure the final result was worth the headache of making it all. I’ll probably try to make gnocchi again someday, and it’ll probably go much smoother the second time around, but for the novices: I would suggest saving this recipe for an evening when you want to get your hands dirty and feel particularly challenged, with only a moderate (albeit healthy) pay-off.

Chocolate Cupcakes with Vanilla Glaze

I’ve been on a baking kick lately. Meaning, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And until this post, I hadn’t actually done any of it since the Monkey Bread Minis.

Baking kind of turns me off. I don’t think I’m enough of a perfectionist to be a baker. As Ms. Abigail Johnson Dodge points out in her book The Weekend Baker, there are lots and lots and lots of finicky rules that “must” be followed. For example, did you know that measuring a dry ingredient, such as flour, with a measuring cup doesn’t actually work? In order to be exactly accurate, you must weigh the ingredients. If you must use a measuring cup, you should never dare dip your measuring cup into the bag of flour. You should always scoop the flour into the measuring cup with a… I don’t know…a special spoon…and then level it off with a knife. And this will only be somewhat accurate if you are using plain stainless steel measuring cups.

Jeez. Talk about intimidation. I don’t have a kitchen scale, nor do I intend on buying one. I don’t have stainless steel measuring cups; I have perfectly good little yellow ones (though I don’t know what they’re made out of). But in the spirit of this blog, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. That, and I was using cake mix from a box.

The Recipe

Chocolate Cupcakes- The recipe for the cupcakes themselves can be found on the back of the Pillsbury “Devil’s Food” cake box. Give me a break- it was a Wednesday night.

Vanilla Icing- This recipe was hidden in a post from Bakerella on Bourbon Sweet Potato Cupcakes. Yum. (Scroll down almost to the bottom of this link for the recipe.)

Apprehension Meter

The meter was reading at a medium-high to high earlier in the day at work, when I was feeling overly ambitious and was considering making homemade fondant to top my cupcakes. The cupcakes didn’t scare me (considering they’re from a box…), but the idea of making fondant really made me nervous. Fondant has a reputation for looking so pretty and perfect draped over cakes and placed neatly onto cupcakes, but that means a greater risk of completely screwing it up.

The meter sank back down to a medium-low once I admitted to myself that a Wednesday night was no time to take on such an endeavor. Vanilla glaze it would be.

Here’s How It Really Went

The boxed cupcakes, well, you know how those go. But the vanilla glaze? So easy! With only four ingredients that basically all get mixed together at once (aside from the milk), it has to be.

A small mountain of Pillsbury chocolate cake mix

Baking the cupcakes took a little longer than I had initially planned. The box made 24 cupcakes, with each batch taking about 18 minutes to bake. I only had one muffin tin, so the baking alone took almost 40 minutes, not factoring in the time to mix together all of the ingredients.

YUM

Feel free to lick everything covered in chocolate when you're done.

After combining the dry and wet ingredients and mixing on medium speed, I dollop-ed ice cream scoop-sized dollops into the lined muffin tin. Using an ice cream scooper sans the little clicky handle thing kind of defeats the purpose of using one, I discovered, but at least you get uniform amounts of batter in each muffin cup.

Once each cup was filled 2/3 of the way with batter, I smoothed each of them down with the backside of a spoon, to hopefully eliminate any weird bumps or abnormalities as they baked.

Crucial information! Never, ever, under any circumstances, open the oven door once your cakes are in there. I learned from Ms. Dodge’s book that opening the oven door can lower the oven temperature up to 50˚! She says that if you must check, check toward the very end of the baking time. This was especially tough for me, as my oven doesn’t have a window to spy through. It’s an exercise in self-restraint.

My goal was smooth cupcakes.

And they turned out… smooth enough.

While letting the little cakes cool, I started to whip up the glaze. The first three ingredients went in all at once, with the milk being added little by little. One thing Bakerella didn’t specify was how to “mix” the ingredients. Did this mean use a hand-held mixer? A whisk? A fork? I wasn’t sure, so I went with a fork, and it was perfect. A whisk would probably also get the job done.

Looking at the two cups of confectioner’s sugar sitting in the bowl, I certainly thought I’d be adding more than four tablespoons of milk to make this stuff turn into a glaze. But you know, four tablespoons turned out to be perfect. A little goes a long way, in this case.

Then came time for the dipping. I transferred the glaze into a smaller, deeper bowl in order to be able to fully submerse the tops of the cupcakes. (Don’t feel bad if you drop one or more cupcake(s) into the bowl- I did.)

One coat created a somewhat see-through glaze. It was kind of neat looking, but I wanted a little fuller coverage. I waited about ten minutes for the first coat to dry a little, then re-dipped. Two coats seemed to do the trick.

One coat

Two lovely, drippy coats

What’s great about these cupcakes and especially the glaze, is that non-professional, non-perfectionist, non-bakers can bake these, and they come out looking, well, imperfect. Just the way they should.

The icing dripping down the sides of the muffin cup, and the bizarre topography of the cupcake top showing through the glaze make them look homemade, and therefore, delicious.