Baked Yeast Doughnuts

Submitted by valgal123

"These doughnuts are light, fluffy, pillows of joy. I was looking for a recipe for baked doughnuts that are fluffy and soft liked the fried version and these are it. From Tartelette blog, this is what she has to say "They are a tad chewier and more like soft pillows of dough" Oh, and these are best right out of the oven."

 

• Ready In: 3hrs 10mins
• Ingredients: 10
• Yields: 24 doughnuts
• Serves: 24

ingredients

• 315.37 ml warm milk, 95 to 105 degrees (divided)
• 11.09 ml dry yeast or 29.58 ml butter
• 157.80 ml sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1182.95 ml all-purpose flour
• 0.25-0.5 ml nutmeg, freshly grated
• 4.92 ml salt
• 118.29 ml unsalted butter, melted
• 354.88 ml sugar
• 14.79 ml cinnamon

directions

1. Place 1/3 cup of the warm milk in the bowl of an electric mixer. Stir in the yeast and sugar and set aside for five minutes or so to let it proof. Stir the butter into the remaining cup of warm milk and add it to the yeast mixture. With a fork, stir in the eggs, flour, nutmeg, and salt - just until the flour is incorporated. With the dough hook attachment of your mixer beat the dough for a few minutes at medium speed. Adjust the dough texture by adding flour a few tablepsoons at a time or more milk. You want the dough to pull away from the sides of the mixing bowl and eventually become supple and smooth. Turn it out onto a floured counter-top, knead a few times (the dough should be barely sticky), and shape into a ball.
2. Transfer the dough to a buttered (or oiled) bowl, cover, put in a warm place, and let rise for an hour or until the dough has roughly doubled in size.
3. Punch down the dough and roll it out 1/2-inch thick on your floured countertop. With a 2-3 inch cookie cutter, stamp out circles in the dough . Transfer the circles to a parchment-lined baking sheet and stamp out the smaller inner circles using a smaller cutter. If you cut the inner holes out any earlier, they become distorted when you attempt to move them. Cover with a clean cloth and let rise for another 45 minutes.
4. Bake in a 375 degree oven until the bottoms are just golden, 8 to 10 minutes - start checking around 8. While the doughnuts are baking, place the butter in a medium bowl. Place the sugar and cinnamon in a separate bowl.
5. Remove the doughnuts from the oven and let cool for just a minute or two. Dip each one in the melted butter and a quick toss in the sugar bowl. Eat immediately if not sooner.
6. Makes 1 1/2 - 2 dozen medium doughnuts.

Reviews

[admslvrsn]

First and foremost, THESE DO NOT TASTE ANYTHING LIKE DOUGHNUTS! The finished product ended up tasting more like glazed yeast rolls. The recipe seems simple enough, but is very unclear. We used both yeast and butter since the directions called for both. We also ised only 1 1/3 cups of milk since that is the amount called for in the recipe. Also when we went to cut the dough it was very difficult because the dough was "gooey" after rising. This recipe only gets 2 stars because it was pretty disappointing after taking so much time to make. Definitely not worth the difficulty.

 

[Paul d.]

'Pillows of joy' indeed! Smelled and tasted just like yeast donuts from the bakery. The yeast behaved very strangely, though, in a way I've never seen it behave except when it's been stale (which I'm pretty sure this yeast wasn't). It never did that bubbly thing in the proofing stage. My suspicion is that, because you add a lot of sugar to a little bit of milk, the yeast was struggling to survive (yeast, like most microbes, requires a lot of moisture and can be kept in stasis when there's too much sugar and not enough moisture). So I'd recommend adding all the milk, stirring until the sugar is mostly dissolves, then adding the yeast. This probably requires melting the butter as a separate step and adding it once the yeast has proofed. (Also, what another reviewer said -- the 'yeast or butter' thing looks like a mistake. If you read the directions you'll see you need both.)