Are you #teampumpkin or #teamapple when it comes to fall baking? I have both feet firmly planted in the apple camp. It’s not officially fall for me until I make Apple Cider Donuts. I have always made a baked version, but this year, Claire Saffitz convinced me to try frying them.
I was not disappointed. Frying results in a craggy crunchy exterior that can’t be replicated by baking. Donuts are best eaten within hours of being made. The dough can be made a day ahead and stored in the fridge. Then all you have to do is fry them when you’re ready.
Because I never met a kitchen gadget I didn’t like, I have a dedicated donut cutter. No need to buy one though. You can just use a 3-1/4 inch round cutter and a second 1-1/4 inch round cutter to cut out the centre. Don’t throw away those donut holes. They are the baker’s treat!
The donuts are intensely apple flavoured thanks to a dough that incorporates both apple butter and reduced apple cider. The interior is pleasantly dense. These are a cake style donut (as opposed to an airy yeast donut). The dough is very sticky, so it needs a rest in the fridge before cutting and frying. It’s critical to flour your cutter very well. You’ll see in the video that I place each donut on a little square of parchment paper. They are much easier to transfer into the fryer this way. Once they start frying, you can remove the paper from the oil with a pair of tongs.
These Apple Cider Browned Butter Doughnuts are the best thing I have baked all year. Yes, I realize that’s a bold statement, given the number of things I have baked in 2020. (It’s been a heavy baking year… we all deal with stress in our own way, don’t judge!)
Granted, these doughnuts are not as pretty as my black and white ones from a few weeks ago, but OMG, the taste and texture of these is off-the-charts fantastic. I was inspired to bake these after seeing a recipe for Apple Cider Doughnut Cake from food writer Tara O’Brady. I subscribe to her newsletter and every week I get a charming, informative and beautifully crafted email.
Tara baked the batter in a loaf pan. Her description of this loaf is so lyrical. I want to write like this when I grow up.😉 “Out of the oven the texture is almost spongy; jaunty and open. As the cake sits, it settles, relaxing into a sturdiness that is exactly right and as it should be. The crust establishes itself with a gentle crunch as it meets the teeth, while the centre fluff gives way with a velvet weight.“
I made the loaves and fell in love with her recipe. Apples are featured prominently. The batter calls for reduced apple cider and applesauce. I wondered what would happen if I baked the batter in doughnut pans. You could also bake them in muffin tins, but they will take a few minutes longer to bake.
As I was assembling the ingredients, I realized I had run out of applesauce, but I had a jar of apple butter leftover from baking this.
There is no actual butter in apple butter. Apple butter is basically concentrated applesauce, or as I like to describe it, “applesauce on steroids“. Alex Delaney wrote a brilliant article explaining the difference.
The doughnuts come together fairly quickly. You will need to reduce the apple cider and brown the butter in advance.
While the doughnuts are delicious plain, dipping them in browned butter and then rolling them in cinnamon-sugar takes them over the top, so don’t skip this step!
I baked these doughnuts several times, the first time to just test the recipe, the second time to shoot the photos and the third time to shoot the video. Luckily I live in a condo and have several neighbours who happily take the leftovers. I also discovered that they freeze beautifully. Wrap individual doughnuts in plastic wrap and place them all in a freezer bag. They will thaw at room temperature in about 45 minutes.
My relationship with doughnuts is a complicated one. I have memories of painful childhood dentist visits followed by a trip to Mr. Donut for a chocolate glazed, as a reward. As a young adult, doughnuts filled an emotional void for me. I was a new mom, pregnant with my second child, and we had just moved to a new city. I missed my family and friends, and felt very lonely. After a visit to the doctor, to check on the progress of my pregnancy (and weight gain), I’d stop by Lady Jane Donuts for a chocolate coconut cake doughnut, to drown my sorrows.
Eventually I replaced doughnuts with friends and it was many years before I indulged again. Doughnuts are really best eaten within a few hours of making them which is why I like making them myself. There are two main types of doughnuts, cake and yeast. Yeast style doughnuts, obviously rely on yeast to do the leavening work. They have a more open crumb structure and a chewier texture. Cake donuts, on the other hand, rely on baking powder and/or baking soda to do the heavy lifting. They result in a donut with a tighter crumb structure, and are denser and more crumbly than yeast donuts. Cake doughnuts are my favourite.
Most Apple Cider Doughnuts suffer from a weak apple flavour. They’re heavily flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg and light on the apple. I wanted to recreate that juicy apple flavour that you get with the first bite of a crisp apple. I learned how to accomplish this from Stella Park at serious eats.com. The secret, it seems, is freeze dried apples pulverized with sugar into a sweet-tart powder for dredging the doughnuts with.
Freeze dried fruit is not the same as dried fruit. Dried fruit is dehydrated and only about 75% of the water is removed. With freeze-dried, the fruit is placed into a vacuum chamber where the temperature is well-below freezing and 99% of the moisture can be removed from the fruit.
A few years ago, I discovered that not all doughnuts need to be fried. There is such a thing as baked doughnuts. They make special doughnut pans, but I decided to use my mini Bundt pans, because they’re a little bit fancy, and that’s how we roll around here at saltandserenity!
The doughnut batter can be made in one bowl and you don’t even need a stand mixer. These are so fast and easy to make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGfE0XAZqeI
You’ll have leftover apple cinnamon sugar which keeps forever, in an airtight jar. I have been mixing in a spoonful with my oatmeal every morning and sprinkling it on buttered toast. YUM.
When the über talented Elizabeth Young of Flowers Talk, emailed me about doing a collaborative post, putting together her flowers and my food, I was game. She suggested we tackle a Chanukah theme. I have been a customer of Elizabeth’s for a long time, and she has an amazing eye for colour and design. Plus, she is just a lovely person. She’s much younger than me and has been giving me pointers on how to grow my Instagram account, encouraging me to reveal a bit of the chaos that my kitchen becomes on shoot days.
As I thought about what food I would feature, I immediately discarded latkes. Too predictable. I wanted something pretty to match the beauty of her flowers. My inspiration for these rose-hued donuts comes from the Israeli custom of celebrating Chanukah with “Sufganiyah” (jelly donuts). I decided to make two kinds of donuts. The first, I’d dip in a tart pomegranate glaze. The second, I’d fill with a pomegranate curd. I’ll post them in a few days. Making pomegranate curd is a tricky endeavour!
This year, Chanukah begins on the eve of Sunday December 2. I have often heard people describe Chanukah as the “Jewish Christmas.” It’s easy to understand this misconception as both holidays emphasize lights, miracles, family time and food. While Christmas and Chanukah both occur in December, the reasons for the celebrations are not at all the same.
Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, the son of God. A miracle, to say the least!
Hanukkah is a celebration of a different kind of miracle. Hanukkah celebrates the military victory of the Israelites, over the Syrian Greeks. Under Syrian-Greek rule, Jews were oppressed and not allowed to practice their religion openly. Against all odds, a small tribe of faithful Jews defeated one of the toughest armies on earth, drove the Greeks out, reclaimed their Holy Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it. When they went to light the Temple’s menorah they found only a single vial of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks. Miraculously, the one-day supply burned for eight days. In memory of this miracle, a national holiday was born. They called it Chanukah, which translates to rededication.
Jews around the world celebrate Chanukah by eating foods fried in oil to commemorate this miracle.
Elizabeth delivered her flowers just as i was mixing up my icing. I think my glaze was a perfect match. I topped these beauties with Edible gold glitter, because we’re fancy around here! (Truthfully, I found a jar of it at the back of my baking cupboard. Can’t recall why I bought it, but it sure is pretty!)
I recently discovered that the “Miracle of Chanukah” story, is just a legend. You know the one I’m taking about, where Judah and his merry band of Maccabees go into the destroyed temple and discover just enough oil to keep the menorah’s candles burning for a single day. But somehow, miracle of miracles, the oil lasted for eight days and the flames of the menorah burned for eight nights. When I discovered that the long lasting oil is not really at the root of the Chanukah commemoration, I felt gutted. Kind of reminiscent of coming home for winter break in first year university to discover that I was the last one in the family to find out that our dog, Heidi, had died!
“Truth” is a word to be avoided when discussing history and religion. Since the victors of a battle often write the history, the facts of what happened in the past depend very much on whom you ask and when it comes to religion, everyone has a different truth.
Chanukah is the only major Jewish holiday not explicitly mentioned in the Torah (Judaism’s written law), since the events that inspired the holiday occurred after it was written. The Rabbis wrote about Chanukah in the Talmud (Jewish oral law and tradition), but that was written over 600 years after the Maccabees revolt. Their version of Chanukah differs markedly from The Books of Maccabees written in the 2nd century B.C.E.
So we have here two versions of the Chanukah story: one from the Book of Maccabees and the other from the Talmud. Both versions agree on the first part of the story. Around 200 B.C.E., Judea (Israel) came under control of the Syrian King, Antiochus III. He was a benevolent fellow and allowed the Jews to continue practicing their religion. Things changed drastically when his son, Antiochus IV, took over.
This evil king outlawed the Jewish religion and ordered the Jews to worship Greek gods. In 168 B.C.E., his soldiers marched into Jerusalem, exterminated thousands of people and desecrated the holy Second Temple by constructing an altar to Zeus and commanded the Jews to sacrifice a pig upon this alter.
The Jewish priest Mattathias and his five sons led a large-scale rebellion against Antiochus and his army. When Mattathias died in 166 B.C.E., his son Judah Maccabee took over. Within two years, the Jews, relying on Guerrilla warfare tactics, defeated the Syrian Greek army and drove them out of Jerusalem.
The Maccabees cleansed the Second Temple, rebuilt the altar, lit its menorah and celebrated the rededication (the word Chanukah means dedication). And thus the eight-day festival of Chanukah was born. Why eight days? Well, here’s where the story begins to diverge. According to The Book of Maccabee II, while the Maccabees were fighting, they had missed the eight-day holiday of Sukkot, (celebrated in early fall) and so to celebrate the Second Temple rededication, they declared a “better-late-than-never” celebration of Sukkot.
Version 2, as written in the Talmud gives us this spin on the eight-day festival. Judah Maccabee and his team, who took part in the rededication of the Second Temple, witnessed what they believed to be a miracle. Even though there was only enough oil to keep the menorah’s candles burning for a single day, the flames burned for eight nights. This wondrous event inspired the Rabbis to proclaim a yearly eight-day festival.
The Rabbis barely mentioned the battle between the Maccabees and the Greeks in the Talmud. The reason for this is unclear. Perhaps they did not want to encourage the celebration of a military battle, or perhaps, as pacifists, they did not want to encourage the Jewish people, who at that time, were living under Roman rule, to be inspired by revolt.
Rabbi Andrew Jacobs, on “Blog Shalom” explains the miracle of Chanukah this way,
“…even without the oil, .Chanukah is still a miraculous story. The Maccabees were a tiny group of Jews who should not have been able to defeat the powerful Greeks. But they did! And because of this miracle, Judaism survived and did not become consumed by Greek culture. This story of miraculous survival repeats itself many times throughout Jewish history. Despite tremendous powers that have raged against us, nothing has stopped the Jewish people. This is a miracle.”
Although the miraculous oil story may be just a legend, I refuse to give up food fried in oil on Chanukah! To celebrate my newfound knowledge, I am going to go all out this year and celebrate Chanukah with these decadent Pomegranate Sugar-Dusted White Chocolate Doughnuts.The idea behind these doughnuts comes from the genius mind of Chef Lynn Crawford. However, after discovering that her recipe called for a pound of butter in the doughnut dough, I decided to use her white chocolate filling and pomegranate sugar coating, but looked elsewhere for the actual doughnuts. Anna Olsen‘s recipe used only a 1/4 pound of butter. So while these doughnuts are not exactly light fare, they are lighter than originally intended by Chef Lynn!
The pomegranate sugar and white chocolate ganache filling can be prepared a day ahead.
These are yeast raised, not cake doughnuts. The dough comes together in about 5 minutes if you have a stand mixer. Thanks to a quarter pound of butter this brioche-like dough has an amazing silky texture.
My deep fryer, which normally only gets pulled out once a year to make french fries takes all the guess work out of deep frying. You can of course use a deep pot with a candy/oil thermometer to regulate the temperature.These babies puff up like little pillows. I can not accurately express the joy I experienced watching my own little miracle here in the deep fryer!Filling the doughnuts with the white chocolate ganache whipped cream is quite simple. A plain piping tip, inserted into the side of the doughnut makes easy work of the job. These doughnuts are really best eaten the same day they are made. I sent 16 of these beauties off with my husband to share with his hockey team after I made them one Sunday afternoon. He said that they were inhaled very quickly and that they actually brought a few of these strong burly hockey players to their knees as they gushed at how good they were.
