H got me a deep fryer for my birthday last week.  I’ve been making donuts, and while my technique is improving, the finished product has been less than stellar. The problem is my inability to keep the oil at a constant temperature in a stockpot. The wok was a total fail. It was time to get serious.

Out in the field I am visiting donut shops on my travels, refining my recipe ideas and nailing down my preference for cake donuts over yeast donuts, an admittedly minority point of view.  Recently I visited Doughnut Plant in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York, famous for their innovative flavors, including a scrumptious tres leches cake donut.  The previous week it was Doughnut Project in Greenwich Village, where I indulged in a pre-birthday ricotta-stuffed glazed donut with a ruby red beet glaze.  Last week was capped off by a trip to Du’s Donuts in Williamsburg, where despite their small size, both the pear clove and carrot cake donuts were knockouts – moist and flavorful with a luscious cake texture, from a supposedly secret recipe that Wylie Dufresne, the king of molecular gastronomy, worked on for months. 

Beyond NYC, one of my all-time favorite shops is Guru Donuts in Boise, which H and I visit whenever we are in town.   Their maple bar is to die for, as is their Hipsterberry, a vegan yeast donut glazed with blackberries and lavender.  Last month Guru hosted a recipe contest, and the young man behind the counter was rather astonished when I whipped out my phone to consult the running list of donut recipes I keep on hand for when sudden inspiration strikes me. I’ll keep you posted if I win!

With my new deep fryer on the counter, I wanted to try a cake style donut inspired by Du’s. And of course, I had to challenge H to pair my donut with a suitable beverage. I chose a traditional Vermont cider donut.  It’s fall and a bit crisp outside, so the woodsy flavor of apple cider appealed.  And I’d just gotten home from almost a month of travel, so a topping of warm spiced sugar seemed homey.  I found the recipe in the archives of Yankee Magazine, as posted on the New England Today website.  It featured boiled apple cider and buttermilk for tang, and cinnamon and nutmeg to flavor the batter (which in my case required a lot more flour than the recipe called for, probably because I used a softer heirloom flour).  Once out of the fryer, the donuts should be dusted with cinnamon sugar, but I put my own twist on the recipe by mixing into the sugar a clove-scented masala chai spice blend H and I bought in India some years ago.

The donuts came out perfect – and H paired them perfectly with a simple glass of caramelly nocino from our local amaro producer, Don Ciccio & Figli.  See H’s companion blog for more on them.

j.