Club: Baked - Farm Stand Buttermilk Donuts

While I make a lot of things that we eat from scratch at home, there are still certain things that have never occurred to me to make at home. Donuts (or doughnuts) are one of these things. Part of this is probably the fact that they aren't a food that we commonly eat, but I cannot blame it all on that as I have been known to enjoy a donut or two in my day. Well, I can no longer say that I am naive to donut-making as these farm stand donuts were the pick of Gloria from the Ginger Snap Girl for our second recipe in the group Club: Baked.

In reality, like most recipes that I seem to be a little weary of, the donuts were really simple to make. About an hour from start to clean-up. I did (and still do) have a fear of frying things. Something about having a pan of hot oil bubbling away on my stove makes me anxious. I am petrified of burning myself or worse lighting something on fire. Nevertheless, I heated up the oil as directed by the recipe, and in the end things (in the frying department) turned out just fine. 

I halved the recipe and ended up with 7 donuts and 7 donut holes. On the group discussion board, a couple people mentioned that their dough was quite sticky. Mine actually ended up too dry, and I had to add a little bit of milk to get the dough to come together. This may or may not be due to the fact that I live in the desert? Since I do not own a biscuit cutter, I also used a drinking glass and shot glass to cut out the respective portions of the donut. As it turns out, the difference in diameter between our glasses and the shot glass is not very big, and I think this affected the way the donuts fried. My donut holes turned out really good and puffed up quite nicely, but my donuts stayed flat when they cooked. Does anyone have any insight on this? 

Nevertheless, we still enjoyed both the donuts and the donut holes, although the donut holes were our favorite. I "dressed" the donuts with a couple different toppings - vanilla glaze and cinnamon sugar. The vanilla glaze was our favorite, but we are frosting folks around here :) If you want to see how the other bakers fared, check out the Club: Baked blogroll page and be sure to give Gloria some love for picking a fun recipe!