Monday Munchies...

I'm in the process of finalizing my Valentine's Day goodies, which of course involved defrosting some cookie dough.  

My kids saw the dough and insisted on doing some baking with me. During the week isn't really a good time to get involved in time consuming crafts, so I promised them that over the weekend we would bake-doughnuts.  

I'm not sure why I automatically default to doughnuts, but I do.

I used a hodge podge of recipes and honestly, I'm not thrilled with the results, but I'll share nonetheless.  

Chocolate Custard filled Doughnuts  

Dough:

4 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoon vital wheat gluten (I used xanthan gum and substituted 1/2 teaspoon for each cup of flour)
1 teaspoon salt
2.5 teaspoon dry active yeast (1 packet)
1 cup lukewarm milk
2 tablespoon sugar
2 large eggs, beaten

2 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Combine 2 tablespoons of sugar, the yeast, and 2 tablespoons of warmed milk-let it sit for5 minutes.  To reduce dishes, use the mixing bowl for this step.

While the yeast is sitting, combine the flour, vital wheat gluten, salt-whisk together. 

Melt your butter now so it has time to cool.  

After the yeast is proofed, combine yeast and dry ingredients into the mixing bowl.  Add the rest of the warmed milk.  Once combined, add in the eggs and the melted butter.  Once the dough is combined, use the dough hook (or knead by hand) for 2 minutes.  

The dough is now ready to sit and rise for two hours in a warm location-just cover it with a towel. 

Once the dough has about doubled in size, roll it into 1/2 inch thickness.  I cut my doughnuts into 3 inch diameter.  Place them on a lightly floured pan and cover and let rise for another 30 minutes.  

Now your doughnuts are ready to go!  Fill a pot with 2-3 inches of vegetable oil, and heat to 350 degrees.  I don't have a thermometer, so I tested it out with only one doughnut in the pot.  It takes at least 5 minutes to heat, although I was being modest with the flame so as not to make it too hot and therefore burn the doughnuts.  Essentially, the doughnuts will fluff up and each side should brown nicely-in the beginning it took 2 minutes per side, but by the end it was only taking one and half minutes each side.  Remove the doughnuts with a slotted spoon and immediately roll in the sugar mixture.  The original recipe called for cinnamon sugar, but I rolled mine in powdered sugar.  

Chocolate Custard:

To be honest, I tried two recipes-neither of them were what I was looking for in my opinion.  This is truly custard, whereas I was hoping for more of a frosting/cream.  

The first recipe I tried used a lot of corn starch, and it went from liquid to solid in a matter of seconds-the seconds I was watching Idena Menzel sing the national anthem.  Let's just say it didn't end well.  I didn't have enough corn starch left to try again, so I had to try a new recipe.  Although I didn't love this one either, I'll share it with you.  It wasn't bad, but I'm just not that into you custard.  

3/4 cup whole milk
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp cornstarch
1/4 cup dark chocolate chips

Add milk, egg yolks, vanilla extract, and sugar on low heat, stir constantly.  Again, I don't have a thermometer, but once it reaches 160 degrees add the cornstarch and turn the heat up to low-medium and begin to cook.  Stir constantly until it reaches pudding consistency.Here's where things got complicated for me.  Once it reaches pudding consistency it needs to be removed from the heat or it might solidify too much-and there's no coming back from that! Once you remove it from the heat, mix in your chocolate chips.  I found that the called for amount of chocolate chips wasn't enough, or it's possible that because my chips weren't dark enough, it didn't taste like chocolate.  Thankfully, I had probably a 1/4 of a cup of dark chocolate chips laying around, and that was made a huge difference. It says to immediately put it into a piping back fit with the metal tip-but my custard just ran right out that end!  There was no way I was refrigerating it-but because it wasn't solidified enough, I couldn't get a good enough grip to pierce the doughnut.  I used a free standing tip to pierce, and then attempted my best to fill the doughnut-which was successful, just super messy.  

In the end, I had beautiful doughnuts, just not what I was going for.  However, I do highly recommend this dough recipe and I will definitely use the dough again.