The bakery fantasy is in full swing now. We’ve been looking at bakery cases online (those things are expensive..) and the other night we cozied up in bed with a notebook and wrote down a list of everything we want to have at the bakery. One of the things that we both are really excited about is…..donuts. We have been wanting to try and make our own donuts for the longest time now. Josh’s dad used to take those biscuit rolls from the grocery store, poke holes in them and fry them as donuts…and for anyone who has ever tried this knows that they taste realllly good. So Josh has been set on making a donut dough that will make donuts that tastes like those fried biscuit-donuts, and he tried once before using a recipe he found online but instead of donuts he got more of a fried, dense bread thing. It wasn’t good at all. So like most other things, we decided if we want them to taste the way we want them to taste, we’re going to have to make them ourselves.
Donuts had been on our minds for weeks when one night while watching TV there a show all about donuts in America. We watched it of course…in all its deep fried, sugar coated, glaze dripping glory. I’m pretty sure one of us yelled out “THAT’S IT!” and we grabbed the computer and started researching how to make donuts. We learned that there are two kinds of donuts; yeast donuts, and cake donuts. Cake donuts don’t have yeast, which make them more cakey and dense. Yeast donuts are more like the donuts we’re accustomed to, they’re more airy and I personally like the flavor better. So we decided to go with the yeast donuts.
We mixed all the ingredients, kneaded the dough, kneaded it some more, and let it rise for about an hour and a half. Then we realized we didn’t have any cookie cutters to make the donut shapes. So we grabbed Olly and walked down to our local kitchen supply store and bought a set of circle cookie cutters. It was kind of expensive but I figured we’ll have them forever and they sure will come in handy when we open our bakery (more dreaming..) Here’s Josh rolling out the dough
When Josh gets in baking mode there’s no stopping him..and I absolutely love it because he usually wants to be the one to do the rolling and kneading and all the hard work, leaving me to take pictures and dream about our bakery some more 
By now it’s probably around 4pm and we had started baking around 1pm. I started to realize that for most people, if they get a donut craving they go to 7-11 or Krispy Kreme and get a donut or 2. But for those of us who are vegan, if we want a donut we have to find a recipe, veganize the recipe, spend hours making it, and hope to all things holy that it turns out tasting like those familiar donuts we were craving. I was thinking about all of this while I was kneading the dough for 10 minutes and realizing how much work goes into the things we make. I think it is a good value not only to have for ourselves but to instill in our children, that you have to work for the things you really want, instead of just walking across the street to 7-11 and buying it.
Anyway, back to the donuts. After we cut them into their shapes they had to rise for another 30-45 minutes. They rose really nicely and started to look like the delicious donuts they were about to become. So we got out our deep fryer (I knew we bought that thing for a reason) and began frying. I wanted to coat them in powdered sugar but we were all out, so we opted for a cinnamon and sugar topping. Josh took the first taste, and they were all we had ever imagined.
The texture was dead-on classic donuty. The cinnamon and sugar topping made it sweet but not rot your teeth out sweet. And now that we know we have a good base recipe, I’ve been fantasizing about jelly donuts, bear claws, donut holes, and every other yummy donut creation. These will definitely be going in the zine.
Oh and p.s., today is my 3 year vegan anniversary! I think I’ll go make some more donuts to celebrate
