Apple and Cinnamon Doughnuts with Maple Syrup Glaze

I made these at the weekend as we had a guest who has given up eating chocolate for lent and so I needed to find something yummy but un-chocolatey to make. I found the recipe for the doughnuts at peaceloveandfrenchfries.com and the glaze I just made up. I changed the recipe a bit to fit with ingredients we have available here and I changed it to European measures.

Ingredients

Doughnuts:
340g apple sauce
1 egg
1 tbsp sunflower oil
100g brown sugar
280g all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp cinnamon

Glaze:
6tbsp maple syrup
250g icing sugar

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 200C and thoroughly grease your doughnut pan.
In a large bowl mix together the apple sauce, egg, oil and sugar.
In another bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and cinnamon.
Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix well.
Add the vanilla essence and mix well.
Pour the mixture into the doughnut pan making sure each doughnut hole is filled to no more than half way.
Put them in the oven on the middle shelf for about 8mins or until they have risen and are springy to the touch.
Remove them from the oven and leave them to cool on a wire rack.
This should make around 24 doughnuts.

When the doughnuts have cooled mix together the maple syrup and icing sugar until it is thoroughly combined and then spread the glaze onto the doughnuts.

Enjoy :)

Chocolate and Cinnamon Doughnuts

A couple of months ago I saw a doughnut baking pan in the random everything shop across the road. I didn't buy it, but I did start thinking about making doughnuts. Recently I've seen a lot of lovely looking baked doughnuts on Pinterest and on Thursday we were out shopping and I bough the pan. This morning I read a lot of different baked doughnut recipes and with a bit of mix and match, came up with my own recipe. The main recipes I learned from were this one by Lara Ferroni and this one by loveveggiesandyoga.com.

My recipe goes like this:

Doughnuts - makes 12
100g flour
40g cocoa
80g sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
30g sour cream
60g natural yoghurt
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
14g butter, melted.

Grease your doughnut pan thoroughly and preheat the oven to 180C.

In a large bowl mix the flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt until it is all combined.
Then add the sour cream, yoghurt, egg, vanilla and butter and mix well. At first I thought I would need to add more liquid, but persevere with the mixing and it will come good! It should end up looking like this:

Then you need to put the mixture into the pan. Most of the recipes I read recommended using a piping bag so you get a nice neat circle of dough in each space in the tin. I don't have on so I just used a spoon. You need to fill each space between 1/2 and 2/3 full. If you overfill the hole will disappear when the dough rises.

Put the pan into the oven on the middle shelf and bake for 6-8 minutes. If the dough springs back when pressed, they are done. I was really surprised by how quickly they were ready. They only took 6mins in my oven.

Loosen them round the edges with a knife and then pop them out and leave them to cool on a wire rack. Whilst they are cooling it's time to make the glaze.

Vanilla Glaze
120g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
5 tsp milk
sugar sprinkles

Add the vanilla to the icing sugar and then add the milk a teaspoon at a time, mixing constantly. When the glaze is liquid enough to drip off a spoon, drip it onto the doughnuts. Beware - this can be very messy! When you have iced all the doughnuts pour sugar sprinkles over them. Leave them for a while so that the icing can set.

And then eat and enjoy!