Making home made donuts...

My hubbie has threatened for some time to make home made donuts...

We both find it funny that Noah the 10 yr old has no idea you can make everything from scratch.

It blows Noah's mind...so we like to show him every once in a while how you can do it!

It keeps the kids occupied for some time.  It shows them how to cook for themselves.

It truly is a learning experience to see how much work goes into making things we take for granted in this fast food world.  It's gotten to the point that we have very little patience for waiting anymore.  You can get a full meal presented to you in 30 sec at McDonald's. 

I guess as parents, Ches and I like to show our kids that instantaneous is just not realistic.

So we set out to make donuts...(sorry I got off on a tangent)...we used the bread maker to start the dough.  It proofed for a while.  Owen decided "proofing" meant we stopped making donuts. 

The bread machine then "punches" the dough...basically beating it up a bit and then letting it proof some more.  At that point, Owen was convinced "proofing" meant we were teasing him and there weren't actually going to be any donuts.

We decided to move onto something else...making the filings!  We made a blueberry fill and an apple fill.  The apples were frozen from the ones we picked from our neighbours wee tree.  They are very sweet, so they didn't require too much extra sweetening, just the basics...cinnamon, a dash of nutmeg and some brown sugar.  We mashed it all up until it was like a thick apple sauce (and smelled like pie!).

The blueberry filling was good too...we had frozen blueberries bought on Hwy 7 near Madoc.  In case you didn't know...in August...Hwy 7 is THE place to buy your blueberries.  Ches added white sugar and a dash of vanilla.  We simmered it on the stove and mashed it with a fork.

That seemed to tide the kids over until it was time to actually cook the donuts.  We don't have a deep fryer...so we filled a deep pan on the stove with veg oil and brought it up to temp.  The dough was formed into shapes and left to rise a bit more.  We fried them in the oil for a couple of minutes a side.  Set donuts aside to cool.  After a while you can fill them with one of those icing decorators filled with whatever filling you want.  We coated some with a honey glaze and tossed some in icing sugar mix. 

This was definitely one of the more decadent recipe experiments by far.  Noah remarked that these were the best 6 hours donuts he'd ever had...since that was about how long it took us to get through the whole process...start to finish.  There was no real savings or health benefit in making these donuts at home.  They were pretty tasty...and they lasted a few days after (way longer than the average Tim's donut) without going stale right away.

This was just one fun thing to do with your kids. 

Just make them help clean up the mess of icing sugar after all is said and done.