Four at a time, the doughnuts turn golden brown in a Dutch oven full of hot oil.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
‘You can make these again,’ taste tester enthuses
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Here’s an array of the ingredients, including flour, sugar, baking powder, butter, orange zest (still on the oranges) and orange juice for the doughnuts, oil for frying, and cocoa, powdered sugar and vanilla for the chocolate frosting.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
The golden brown doughnuts were fried for 45 seconds on each side; four darker brown ones stayed in the oil for an entire minute on each side.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Our test cook dunks a doughnut into the chocolate glaze.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Homemade orange doughnuts with chocolate glaze, ready to eat (SO ready to eat!)
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Mary Therese Biebel
Times Leader Test Kitchen
The uncooked doughnuts look ghostly pale, despite having numerous flecks of orange zest throughout.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
After feeding them peas and carrots a few weeks ago and, before that, whole-grain breakfast cookies, I decided the newsroom taste testers deserved a treat that didn’t claim to be health food.
“You’ve suffered enough,” I joked last week as I passed around a plateful of orange doughnuts with chocolate frosting, in keeping with the colors of Halloween.
“Oh, oh, I love this,” editor Roger DuPuis said as he tried one.
“Really good,” said obituary writer Maria Dibou. “You can make these again.”
While I bask in the glow of these warm comments, I’ll tell you about the making of the little gems. It was only the second time in my life that I’ve made doughnuts and only my third attempt to deep-fry anything. So I was nervous.
But I decided to face my fears.
I found the recipe at a website called Love Bakes Good Cakes, posted by a woman named Jamie who might not recognize her instructions after all my tweaks — some accidental and some on-pupose.
First, I misread the 1 teaspoon grated orange peel that’s supposed to go into the dough and ended up putting in 1 tablespoon, 3 times as much. That didn’t seem to hurt it. Neither did the one-half teaspoon of orange extract that I deliberately added, along with the vanilla extract, for extra orange flavor.
Second, the directions said to roll out the chilled dough on a lightly floured surface and cut it with a doughnut cutter. (Yes, I chilled the dough, for even longer than the minimum 2 hours.) But, since I couldn’t find my rolling pin, and I don’t own a doughnut cutter, I ended up cutting the dough with a knife and shaping it with my hands. That explains why the doughnuts aren’t perfectly round but have a kindergartener-with-Play-Doh kind of charm.
Third, the directions said to fry the doughnuts at 375 degrees F. As I was dutifully heating the oil, with a digital thermometer on hand, the thermometer suddenly stopped working. So I simply guessed when the oil might be sufficiently hot. Maybe that’s why my first few doughnuts seemed to get a little too brown …
I solved that problem by frying them for 45 seconds on each side, instead of the 1 minute per side that the recipe mentioned. This resulted in more of a golden brown.
Finally, the last way I went rogue was to switch gears and whip up chocolate frosting instead of the orange glaze that accompanied the original recipe.
Among my newsroom taste testers, page designer Lyndsay Bartos recognized chocolate and orange as “a classic flavor combination” and was pleased that neither overpowered the other. Reporter Patrick Kernan, who had not known it was a classic combo, said he was surprised at how well the two flavors complement each other. “I thought the orange would make it acidic,” he said, “but it didn’t.”
At home, fellow test cook/husband Mark declared the doughnuts “look beautiful” and decided he liked them just fine without the frosting. My mom/neighbor liked them plain, too.
All in all, the taste testers were pleased, nothing was burned or singed, and I feel a little more confident about frying in oil — especially since reporter Kevin Carroll told me “It’s a really good doughnut, nothing against the peas and carrots.”
Here is the original recipe for Orange Doughnuts, from Love Bakes Good Cakes.
Orange Doughnuts
3 1/4 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of salt
2 eggs, slightly beaten
2/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon grated orange peel
2/3 cup orange juice
1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) butter, melted
Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl and set aside. In a large bowl, beat eggs, sugar and vanilla until thick and lemon colored. In a small bowl, combine the orange peel, orange juice and butter.
Add the orange juice mixture and dry ingredients alternately to the egg mixture. Beat with electric mixer just until blended after each addition. Cover and chill dough for at least 2 hours.
Roll out onto a lightly floured surface to ⅜-in. thick. Cut with a floured 2½-in. doughnut cutter. Fry in oil (375°F) about one minute per side, turning once. Drain on a rack over paper towels.
Mix all of the glaze ingredients until well combined. Dip the tops of doughnuts into the glaze and place glaze side up on the rack to set. The yield is about 18 doughnuts.
If you want to use Orange Glaze, the website author recommends mixing 2 cups powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon grated orange peel and 3 tablespoons orange juice.
For a basic Chocolate Glaze, mix together 1.5 cups powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons cocoa powder, 2 tablespoons water and 2 teaspoons vanilla.
