Homemade Doughnuts (or Monkey Bread!)
Next to cake, my very favorite sweet on the planet is a doughnut. I legitimately cannot resist them and appreciate them in all shapes and sizes. My love affair began at a really early age, when my mom would let me pick a doughnut out of the grocery store case when we happened to be shopping just the two of us. I tend to be pretty persuasive - especially when sugar is involved - and I’m positive it was originally my idea to reward good behavior with doughnuts. I always got a chocolate-frosted, rainbow-sprinkled variety.
It didn’t stop there. In high school, I would drive a few of my teammates very out of the way on our way home from Saturday morning swim practice just so that we could stop by Charlottesville’s local Spudnuts before they ran out for the day (RIP, Spudnuts). And I can remember several moments in college when I would “give up sweets” only to find myself elbow-deep in a box from Dunkin. Ugh. And then there was my first Fractured Prune experience…!
You truly can’t go wrong with fried dough covered in sugar. This recipe is for delicate, yeast-risen and then fried doughnuts. It actually originates from my first job after pastry school, where I don’t have the fondest of memories. It was a luxury hotel, but still- like most banquet cooking- a slave to the economy of scale. We took more things out of frozen boxes than we actually made from scratch, and it was rare that the chef suggest we use precious time and resources to develop our own recipes. As a recent culinary school grad and a general big idea, big effort type of person- I hated it. But I did love a lot of the people. And despite all the red tape that comes with serving 300+ guests at a time, like being understaffed and over budget, there were a lot of bright moments and recipes that I held on to from that time. I only lasted about a year and a half in that job before I jumped ship to focus on my cake business and took (what felt like at the time) a random job working in an office in DC “to pay the bills.”
That job happened to be located across the street from an Astro Doughnuts. And long after I fell in love with that “random office job”, I’d still stop by Astros to satisfy my pastry sweet tooth and appreciate the fact that this year during Cherry Blossom season in DC I was enjoying the beauty of the season, instead of stuffing factory-made chocolate truffles into room service amenity boxes for thousands of tourists.
Recipe notes: I’d treat this as a basic sweet “mother dough” type of recipe. In terms of flavorings, fillings and glazes you can definitely build on it and make pretty much any type of doughnut you’d like. It can also be repurposed as a really good pull-apart or Monkey bread, if you’re not into the cutting and frying steps of the recipe. For monkey bread, simply stop at step 4, and roll your dough into 1” balls instead of cutting into a doughnut shape. Roll in melted butter and then cinnamon/sugar and crowd them into a baking dish with plenty of room to grow at the top. Let it proof for two hours before baking or overnight in the fridge (with an additional 40 min at room temp the next morning) and bake at 350* until golden brown on top. Baking time depends on your oven and the pan you choose but for a 9” loaf pan it’s usually around 25 minutes for me.
