Baked Doughnuts

Essays. Essays alllll around. For the foreseeable future and then some. It’s this kinda time of the year when exam stress kicks in and the library becomes the closest thing you have to a social life and talking about your individual work load becomes the new gossip. It’s this kinda time of the year when no one has time to faff around with fancy flavour combinations and hours of hands-on baking time because there’s always more pressing stuff to be done. It is with complete honesty that I present to you the easiest and fastest little treats in the baking sphere at the minute. Trendier than a cupcake, quicker than a cupcake and cuter than a cupcake – a baked doughnut.Yes, you need a special doughnut tin for this particular recipe but don’t worry – they’re super easy to come by and it’s probably the best way you could spend a tenner this year. So much potential for doughnut fun! This is a cake doughnut so there’s no need for any yeast, rising time or kneading… (regular readers will remember that time I broke my mixer trying to knead doughnut dough – disaster)

You can have these done and dusted within the hour.

Makes 16 doughnuts – you can easily halve the recipe to make 8 🙂

For the doughnuts:

250g plain flour

2tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (worth it – trust)

2 large eggs

130g light brown sugar

120ml milk

120g Greek yoghurt (I used Fage 0%)

60g salted butter, melted

1tbsp vanilla extract

For the chocolate glaze:

100g milk or plain chocolate

30g butter

2 tsp golden syrup

2 tsp water

1 jar biscoff spread

Various decorations

1) Preheat the oven to 170FAN and spray a doughnut tin liberally with non-stick spray

2) Whisk all the dry ingredients (except the brown sugar) together in a large bowl and set aside

3) Mix the eggs, milk, greek yoghurt and brown sugar together (or just give it a quick whizz in a food processor) until smooth

4) Stir through the melted butter and vanilla extract

5) Pour the wet ingredients in to the bowl full of dry ingredients and give it a couple of stirs until JUST combined – it will be lumpy!

6) Transfer the batter in to a piping bag or a ziploc/freezer bag and seal it up. Cut a small corner off the end and use it to add the batter to the doughnut cavities. One ring of batter is enough per doughnut

7) Bake for 8-10 minutes until the doughnuts are lightly browned and springy. Keep repeating until you have used all of the batter. Cool on a wire rack.

8) For the chocolate glaze, heat the chocolate, butter, golden syrup and water in the microwave (stopping every 30 seconds to stir) or heat in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water until smooth and glossy. Dip the top of the doughnuts in to the glaze and use the back of a spoon to smooth it out. If you want ALL chocolate glazed doughnuts then double the amount stated but I like to switch it up a bit and have a couple of different flavours going on. I used some biscoff spread to glaze the rest of the doughnuts and simply heated a few heaped tablespoons of the stuff in the microwave and dipped the doughnuts in. To save even more time, you could glaze all the doughnuts this way using whatever spread you like (peanut butter, nutella etc etc).

Decorate with lots of sprinkles or anything you have lying around!