OK, so here’s the deal. I am not a donut person. Why, I have no idea, except it might have started as far back as grade school for me.

Back when I was in 4^th and 5^th grade (around the time when dinosaurs became extinct), our elementary school was right across the street from a small convenience store. Don’t really remember more about the store than that it was quite tiny and sold the best maple bars ever. Ever!!! And I bought one every opportunity I could. Never candy bars, or ice cream bars, not even Hostess cupcakes. I bought maple bars. And ever since, I have never found another fried donut type goodie to equal those amazing, incredible, perfectly fried and frosted wonders.

So among most of my friends and relatives, I am kind of an enigma. Because, after all, who doesn’t like donuts? But when you have experienced perfection at an early age like I did, it’s very difficult to settle for second best.

But recently our friend Carol Anne posted a picture of some cake donuts she made aboard their boat. They looked so delicious. So I decided if Carol Anne could bake donuts for her and her husband Dave on a boat, I should be able to build a batch for Mr. C. and me from our kitchen. So that’s just what I did.

However, while I was plotting how to top these little babies, I thought about those maple bars I loved so long ago. (And yes, I have eaten a few maple bars over the last 65 years, but probably not more than 5. They just don’t make um like they used to! Yup, I’m getting old.)

Anyway, given the donut ingredients, including cinnamon and nutmeg, I decided a maple icing would make a really nice topping. So that’s what I did for this batch. (You notice I said for this batch. Because the donuts turned out so well, were so easy to make, and so darned delicious, I’m sure I will be making them again and again.)

The donut recipe came from one of my favorite food sites -sallysbakingaddiction.com. Sally’s recipe called for the cinnamon sugar topping you will find below. I added the recipes for vanilla glaze and maple icing recipes because I always appreciate having options, and I presume you do too. Luckily for me when I asked Mr. C. which topping he would prefer, there was no hesitation. I would have made the maple icing regardless, but it was nice of him to pick the correct choice.

So my friends, I have to eat my words once again (no wonder I have digestive issues once in a while). I now have to state unequivocally, that I like donuts. Well not all donuts. But I sure as heck like these guys. Hope you do too.

As always, peace and love to all.

Donuts:

2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour (fluffed)  

2 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. kosher salt

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

½ tsp. ground nutmeg

4 T. (½ stick) unsalted butter

2/3 c. brown sugar, packed

½ c. whole milk

½ c. sour cream

2 lg. eggs, at room temperature

1 T. vanilla extract

Spray metal or silicon donut pans with non-stick spray. Set pans aside.

Please note: Donuts baked in a silicon pan take longer to bake.

Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg together in a small bowl. Set aside.

Melt the butter in a large glass mixing bowl. Whisk in the brown sugar, milk, and sour cream. Finally add the eggs and vanilla, whisking until fully combined. 

Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients; mix just until combined. Do not overmix. The batter will be quite thick.

To transfer the batter to the cavities on your donut pans, fill a quart sized zip-lock freezer bag with the batter. Zip the top closed. Cut off a corner at the bottom of the bag, and pipe the batter into each donut cup, filling only ¾ of the way full.

Bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 7-13 minutes for small donuts, or 9-16 minutes for regular sized donuts, or until the edges are lightly browned and a toothpick inserted into a donut comes out clean. Do not under bake. (I made that mistake. Never again!)

Remove for oven and allow the donuts to cool for about two minutes before transferring to a wire rack set on a large baking sheet. Top the donuts with one of the three topping options listed below.

This recipe makes about 16 small donuts. My silicon pan cavities measure 2.9 inches across. So my pans make fairly small donuts.

Cinnamon Sugar Topping:

½ c. granulated sugar

½ tsp. ground cinnamon

¼ c. (½ stick) unsalted butter, melted

Combine the sugar and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Dip the donuts in the melted butter, then dunk into the cinnamon sugar mixture coating just the top half

Note: Donuts are best served immediately. Leftovers keep well covered tightly at room temperature for up to 2 days.

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Vanilla Glaze:

½ c. powdered sugar

½ tsp. vanilla extract

1 small pinch salt

1 or 2 T. whole milk

In a medium bowl whisk together the powdered sugar, vanilla extract and salt. Add 1 tablespoon of milk, and whisk to combine. If the glaze is too thick, add additional milk, ½ teaspoon at a time until the desired consistency is reached.

Maple Icing:

3 T. unsalted butter

½ c. brown sugar, packed

2 T. whole milk

¾ c. powdered sugar

1 tsp. maple extract

In a small heavy saucepan, heat the butter, brown sugar, and milk together. Bring to boil and simmer for 3 minutes.

Remove from heat and cool for 15 minutes. Add powdered sugar and maple extract; blend well. Add additional powdered sugar as needed.

Spread on cooled cake donuts. Let set before serving.   

Note: Donuts are best served immediately. Leftovers keep well covered tightly at room temperature for up to 2 days.

You can freeze the donuts for up to 2 months. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator and warm up to your liking in the microwave. I usually just nuke them for a few seconds.

 

  

OK, I know. You don’t make pastries. You are gluten challenged. And you don’t eat sweets! Got it. But if you did, aren’t, and do, you should most definitely add this recipe to your “must make for breakfast at my earliest convenience” list. Because this recipe is easy, almost fool proof (I made it after all), and absolutely delicious. And did I mention it was easy. Yah I did. But it bears repeating.

So the other morning I really wanted to fix individual pastries to share. (Social distancing of course.) Our friends are in the process of building a new home, selling the home they are living in (which of course means packing every last thing they own), and staying well (covid-19 free) all at the same time. Any one of these 3 things is stressful all by itself. But in combination? Might as well just take a hammer and beat yourself up with it as take on this great an adventure at this time. But who knew the coronavirus was going to impact our lives to the extent it has? At least my crystal ball didn’t share that information with me. And apparently theirs didn’t either. So I thought a bit of something fun for their breakfast the next day would add a bit of sunshine to their morning. (Wouldn’t hurt as a nice beginning for our day either.)

So being a cheese Danish lover I decided to do some searching on how to make individual cheese Danishes. (My recipes Cream Cheese Danish and Dried Cranberry and Almond Braided Danish are terrific, but they aren’t individual pastries.)

I found the recipe for the dough part of this pastry on the letthebakingbegin.com site. The fillings part I lifted from my Cream Cheese Danish recipe, along with dusting each Danish with granulated sugar before the final rise. And I must say, the overall product was better than I anticipated. Actually I didn’t really know quite what to expect. But what a surprise when the finished product not only tasted terrific, it was pretty to boot! (I love it when a plan comes together.)

So if you too have a burning desire to prepare a pastry that truly looks and tastes like it just came from a bakery, then this is the recipe for you.

As always, keep baking, keep pushing yourself to try recipes that even a year ago would have scared the pickles out of you, and don’t think less of yourself if you try something and it doesn’t look like Martha Stewart was personally directing your every action. Most of us are just home cooks. Pretty darn good home cooks, but never-the-less we don’t have the advantage of having attended culinary school. (At least I’ve never had that opportunity.) So I cut myself some slack when I make a mistake, my final product doesn’t look like the one pictured on the creators site, or I have to look up a culinary term I had never heard of before. I’m not a trained chef. I’m a home cook.

Several years ago my good friend Christine and I were talking about food preparation. She hit the nail on the head perfectly when she said she was simply a good “mommy” cook. And I realized, at that time, that’s exactly what I was too. I’ve expanded my repertoire of dishes since then, but only because I have more time than I did when I was a working mother feeding a family.   So again, try new dishes, but don’t berate yourself if the final product isn’t perfect. Perfection is overrated anyway. I think Guy Harrison truly had the right idea when he wrote: “Perfection is overrated, boring. It’s the imperfections—the vulnerabilities, the weaknesses, the human elements—that make us who we are, that make us real, beautiful…necessary.” Peace and love to all.

Pastry Dough:

1 c. lukewarm whole milk

2 tsp. active dried yeast 

⅓ c. granulated sugar

2 T. sour cream

4 egg yolks

¼ tsp. kosher salt

3 oz. (¾ stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

3½ – 4 c. unbleached all-purpose flour

vegetable oil 

In the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the lukewarm milk, yeast, and sugar. Let sit for 5 minutes.

Add the sour cream, egg yolks, salt, butter, and about 3 cups of the flour. Using your dough hook, mix/knead the dough for 6-8 minutes or until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, and feels slightly tacky to the touch. (You will probably need more flour. And there will still be a bit of dough that wants to stick to the bottom of the bowl when it’s time to stop the machine.)

Pour a bit of veggie oil over the dough, and using your hands, roll the dough into a ball. Make sure the entire ball of dough is lightly oiled. (This helps keep the dough from cracking and drying as it rises.)   

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise for 70-90 minutes or until doubled in bulk. Meanwhile, prepare the cream cheese filling. Once the dough is doubled, punch it down and divide into 14-16 equal sized pieces.

Shape each piece of dough into a ball by tucking the ends underneath until you get a smooth surface on top. Set the balls on large parchment paper lined baking sheets evenly spaced. Make sure the pastries are at least 3 inches apart.  Let rest for 10 minutes, then dip the bottom of a glass into the middle of each pastry to form an indentation that goes almost to the bottom of the ball.

Using a medium sized ice cream scoop, fill each pastry indentation with the cream cheese filling. Smooth out the filling, and plop a heaping teaspoon of jam or preserves in the middle of the filling. Lightly dust the entire pastry with granulated sugar. Place in a warm place and allow the pastries to almost double in size, about 45 minutes.

Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 19-22 minutes, or until the outside is golden brown. The internal temperature of the pastry should be at least 190 degrees.

Remove from the oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container on your counter for up to a day. Then move to the refrigerator. When ready to serve, warm on high for 20 seconds in your microwave. You can also freeze the pastries for up to a month. To thaw, pop them in the oven straight from the freezer for about 5 minutes at 350 degrees.

Cream Cheese Filling:

2 pkgs. (8 oz. each) cream cheese, room temperature

1 c. granulated sugar, plus more for dusting

1 tsp. vanilla

jam, jelly, preserves, or curd of choice (strawberry, peach, apricot, raspberry, marionberry, lemon, etc.)   

Beat the cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla together until smooth. Set aside until needed.  

       

OK, when I started my written ramblings in a recent post about rhubarb muffins, I stated that I wasn’t particularly enamored with either muffins or coffee cake because I often found them too dry. But in my quest to supply you with a superfluity of recipes that contain a sourdough starter, I stumbled upon some recipes for sourdough coffee cake. So I gave out a loud sigh, bit the bullet, and cobbled this recipe together.

Now in all honesty, I wasn’t expecting very much from this venture. But surprise, surprise. This coffee cake is one of the best baked goods I have ever made. It’s moist, delicious, crunchy, not too sweet, and just about everything you could ask for in a breakfast treat. And yes, I like to make our breakfasts as delicious and well planned out as our dinners. I enjoy changing things up a bit every morning by serving a variety of breakfast meats (not all in the same meal you realize), Greek yogurt, homemade granola or cereal, different kinds of home-baked items containing gluten, and fresh fruit. We almost always have an over-easy egg, but that’s about the only constant at the Carr breakfast table. I just happen to believe it’s important to start the day with a hearty and delicious breakfast. Kind of sets the tone for the whole day.

Anyway, my point is that breakfast is important. That variety, even at the breakfast table when all in attendance might not even be fully awake yet, can make a difference in setting their (and your own) mood meter on positive rather than towards the other end of the scale. I’m not saying that everything will be perfect if you serve your family a nice breakfast. But it sure as heck can’t hurt!

So to all of you for whom breakfast is your responsibility, I salute you. It’s not easy being creative when you’re still half asleep. I know. When I was a single working mom, with three kids to feed, a hot breakfast was on the table every weekday morning promptly at 7:15 a.m. OK, it wasn’t fancy, but it was hot and nourishing. And it was a constant in my kid’s lives. And that was very important. Mom = love = safety = food = shelter = emotional security. (BTW, I did feed the kids breakfast on weekends too. They were just more elaborate meals and served much later than 7:15 in the stinkin’ morning!)

As always, keep fixing great food for yourself and your family, keep trying new recipes, and don’t forget to take time out for yourself whenever you get the opportunity. You deserve a break as much as anyone. Probably even more when it comes right down to it!  

Topping:

4 tsp. unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

½ c. brown sugar, packed

unsalted butter (I cut off the third cup of butter I need for the coffee cake batter, and simply use the rest of the stick for this topping.)  

½ c. chopped walnuts

Using your fingers, mix all of the topping ingredients together. Set aside while you prepare the cake batter.

Coffee Cake:

1 c. sourdough starter discard, room temperature

1/3 c. semi-melted butter (I only nuke until some of the butter has melted and the rest is just very, very soft.)

1 egg  

½ tsp. vanilla

1 c. unbleached all-purpose flour (remember to fluff the flour)

½ c. granulated sugar

¼ c. brown sugar, packed

½ tsp. kosher salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

¼ tsp. ground nutmeg

Whisk the sourdough starter, semi-melted butter, egg, and vanilla together. Whisk the flour, sugars, salt, soda, cinnamon, and nutmeg together. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, just until combined. Scoop dough into a lightly greased 9-inch square or 11×7-inch rectangular pan. Even off the top as much as possible. Sprinkle topping evenly over the batter.

Bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. (A toothpick stuck into the coffee cake should come out clean.) Do not overbake. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely on a wire rack before serving. Warm slightly if serving the next day.

A note about sourdough starters:

There is a lot of information about sourdough starters on line these days. Great information, but some of it paints a sourdough starter as just a little too precious for me to handle. I’m of the KISS (Keep It Simple Sister) principle. Especially since I only use my starter 2 or 3 times a week. I consider a sourdough starter as simply an ingredient, not an honored guest in my home. Yes it must be fed regularly because it contains living fungus – Saccharomyces cerevisiae. (At least my starter does, because I used active dry yeast to start my starter.) But feeding it twice daily as some references would suggest? Not this kid. Plus I insist that I be able to use my sourdough starter any old time I want, regardless of whether it has been recently “fed” or has happily been residing in my refrigerator for the last 7 days!

So most of my recipes, like this one, are based on a very liquidy, not just fed starter (often referred to as “discard”) that has come straight from the fridge. In this recipe however, please allow the starter to come to room temperature before adding other ingredients.