Gratitude # 53

I love weekends. I don’t need an alarm clock to rip me out of my nice, cozy bed. I don’t have to get going and out the door if I don’t want to. I get to spend time with my family. I get to do whatever I feel like doing — well, within the boundaries my kids set, that is. They come first, after all. Yesterday I finally decided to make a batch of doughnuts from scratch. I came to the conclusion that we’d eat doughnuts for our Sunday morning breakfast while I made pancakes after Brian got home from the store. (Yes, he got up super early to go to the store while me and the kids stayed home and slept in.) I made some pizza dough first since we needed to celebrate National Pie Day properly. Brian baked a caramel apple pie because apparently our problem areas aren’t having enough problems to begin with.

So I’ll bet you’re wondering about these home-made doughnuts. I cut Alton Brown’s doughnut recipe in half since I figured a yield of 20-25 doughnuts was way too much. I just wanted a dozen and some doughnut holes, which is exactly what the halved recipe yielded. I made some “normal” doughnuts — the kind with the hole in the middle — with chocolate coating (just melted chocolate with a bit of milk, really, but next time I’ll need cream to make it more of a ganache). I also made some raspberry jelly filled doughnuts covered in powdered sugar, making a ridiculous mess in the process of piping the jelly into them. Leave it to me to find a recipe that instructed me to pipe the filling in when most others confirmed that my idea of folding the dough over the jelly would’ve worked better. Live and learn, right? I also made some applesauce filled doughnuts with a cinnamon sugar coating. Next time I’ll do apple jelly instead, even though that experiment was alright. Hey, I’m a woman who likes to experiment with her food! Of course the little doughnut holes were fun. I forgot to save some to dip into the chocolate, but I preferred them with the cinnamon sugar coating. Next time I’ll have to figure out another storage method to keep them fresh and from getting soggy, and I’ll have to tweak the amount of sugar in the as they weren’t as sweet as we would’ve liked.

In the words of Homer Simpson, “mmm, doughnuts!”