Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
Bread is one of the inevitable human inventions. It would've happened in absolutely any case where there were grains, water, and heat. You can sort of see how our forebears got there. You've got your grains and you've got your water. Together, they make mush. Eventually you get tired of eating the mush. Maybe heat the mush? Eventually you get tired of eating even warmed mush. Maybe just heat the moisture right on out of there, to de-mush it. Hey! Now you have bread. A couple thousand years later, you've got shared human culture.
Who among us hasn't enjoyed the simple, rustic pleasure of wiping the delicious grease from a plate of food using not a napkin, but a donut? Or sitting down to a bowl of hot soup and a nice buttered hunk of donut, for dunking? Or taking some tasty sliced meat, cheese and vegetables, and layering them between one iced strawberry donut and a second iced strawberry donut? Or sheathing your fingers in a shiny glazed donut when reaching down into a crock full of hearty spiced stew? Ah, the simple joy of popping two slices of hearty donut into the toaster each morning, to enjoy with scrambled eggs. It unites us all! When you say the word "bread" aloud, in any language, immediately what pops into any listener's mind is sticky pink icing, a vanilla glaze, lots of sprinkles. Definitely they are thinking about deep-fat frying.
That is why your intrepid Defector idiots were so happy—so truly overjoyed—to be assigned the job of making Paul Hollywood's Glazed Donuts for the technical challenge of Bread Week, that one single week of Great British Bake Off when all the judges have to do is remember three different examples of humankind's oldest and most widely varied foodstuff. As the donut is itself obviously the basis for most other forms of bread—bread after all being mostly dessert, mostly a confection, mostly iced, mostly circular, and virtually never made using an oven—naturally it makes so much sense to assign donuts as a core test of a baker's bread-making ability.
Chris Thompson: Good morning, Kelsey! I hope you enjoyed your experience of making bread for Bread Week!
Kelsey McKinney: Good morning, Chris! I very much enjoyed my act of making bread for bread week … oh wait. No I didn't. There was no damn bread!
CT: I really believe that Paul Hollywood is just sick of this shit. He mentioned during this technical challenge that he loves donuts and considers them his guilty pleasure, up there with hot dogs. The man wants to eat donuts and icing, and he will shove those desires into absolutely any part of his day job, if he must.
KM: As we will see later, I too am sick of this shit and will eat what I want. I understand this frustration, because I feel it toward Paul Hollywood.
CT: Kelsey, what is your relationship to donuts? Are you a donut enjoyer? Have you ever made donuts before?
KM: Two huge questions! I am from the exurbs of Dallas, where for some reason every single strip mall has a donut store named DONUT or (rarely) [Woman’s Name] DONUT. All of the donuts are garbage, and I love them very much and feel a lot of affection toward them. As a kid, we got to get donuts when we had sleepovers, and I remember that quite fondly.
As for making donuts, I will tell you about that soon, but I do it every single Thanksgiving. First, tell me about your relationship with donuts.
CT: When I was a kid, I thought donuts were God's perfect food. To seven-year-old me, the very best thing you could ever eat in your life was a yeast donut, glazed, with chocolate icing. The second-best thing you could ever eat in your life was a jelly donut. The third-best thing you could ever eat in your life was an apple fritter, which to me is a donut.
KM: I completely agree on the first thing. I loved chocolate icing and sprinkles. But to me, the second-best things were regular glazed donut holes, and the third-best thing were the cinnamon twists. Apple fritter is definitely a donut. I wish we had made those this week.
CT: So as an adult, if you find yourself in BERTHA'S DONUT on a fine Saturday morning, what is your donut order? Are you still going chocolate iced mode, or have you matured beyond this delight?
KM: As an adult, I have a very savory palate, so I sometimes struggle with donuts. The only ones I really want are the chocolate iced with sprinkles, because the nostalgia overcomes my savory-only palate. Can you still eat donuts?
CT: Not really. That first bite of a donut is always spectacular, and if I turn off the part of my brain that is aware of the future, I could probably pretty easily eat myself to death. But if I stop over at my mom's house on a Sunday and there's a box of donuts on the kitchen counter, I pretty much stay at the opposite end of the house. One donut will cause me to feel genuinely terrible for a solid 36 hours. It took me all the way into middle-agedness to come to this realization.
Relatedly, whew, the day after this bake was rough.
KM: I completely agree. I felt terrible yesterday (the day after the bake) because I had eaten so many donuts just absentmindedly.
CT: Those little donut holes and donut scraps were irresistible.
KM: Not our fault they were delicious! Now, Chris, have you ever made donuts before?
CT: Not this kind of donut, not the standard donut. I think of donuts as a takeout food. I've made apple fritters once before, and they turned out OK. I might've used an Alton Brown recipe. Donuts are not something I would usually choose to make, even if I could eat them more often, just because I think of them as messy, and therefore of the making of them as obviously even messier. Boy was I correct!
Would you like to tell the class about your donut-making habits?
KM: I do not come from a family that values traditions, but unfortunately I love traditions, so as an adult I have tried to make as many of them as I can. One of my traditions is making friend-of-the-blog and professional baker Dayna Evans's screppelle, which are twisted raisin donuts coated in sugar. I make these on Thanksgiving day because the sugar gives me energy in the kitchen, and it's a nice little treat for everyone while I make them wait until like 7 p.m. to eat dinner.
CT: Making a morning confection to hulk up for the making of a humongous feast—couldn't be me! Truly you are Built Different as hell.
KM: Thank you LOL.
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: This was not a very complicated shopping list, thank heavens. Mostly flour and fat and sugar. Did you make any substitutions in there, or did you play it straight?
KM: In fact, I did make some substitutions. Paul Hollywood would have thrown my ass right out of the tent.
CT: I'll throw him out of the damn tent!
KM: I had almost all the ingredients for this bake, except for sunflower oil (I used canola) and "deodorized coconut oil" (I used the odorized kind).
CT: I also could not find deodorized coconut oil. I didn't bother looking for sunflower oil, I just used peanut oil.
KM: I still could not find "strawberry flavoring." How on earth this show came up with TWO episodes that needed strawberry flavoring is beyond me. But I read down and saw that the method said we would be making strawberry icing to dip the donuts in. I don't know about you, but I have never had a strawberry dipped donut, and I didn't want to have one. So before this bake even began, I made an executive decision to make a ganache instead, and make the chocolate donuts with sprinkles that I LIKE because it's MY TENT.
CT: Hell yeah!
I've had strawberry dipped donuts, and they're acceptable. The thing I object to is the dependence on extracts. This is the second time this season that Paul has done this to us, and I am sick of it.
KM: Listen, I understand that Britain is a sad island with sad crops and sad taste buds, but COME ON. We live in a globalized world! You can buy almonds at the store! You can buy strawberries!
CT: I just sincerely do not want in my kitchen six of a thing that tastes and smells like extract. I realize the contestants don't have to deal with this; they just leave the tent. But we try to redeem these ingredients and not be wasteful, and that means generally trying to eat some of this stuff.
KM: Also, the extracts are expensive! The only extract I accept in this home is vanilla, as God intended.
CT: I decided that instead of extract, I would get my strawberry flavoring from by-God strawberry preserves. I figured this would disrupt the texture of my icing, but to me that is a worthy trade.
KM: Ooooh. I love this plan.
CT: The only other ingredient worth noting, I think, is "fast-action dried yeast." I pretty much always have little packets of yeast, but it was only at the last minute, as I was headed to the check-out, that I remembered that there is in fact a faster yeast than the one I stock at home.
KM: I just had whatever yeast was in my jar in my house, which is labeled "yeast." I'm not sure what its deal is. I buy it in bulk.
CT: As it turned out, I could've used any damn old yeast, because I flubbed the method and ruined everything, but for a moment I felt smart that I went back for Turbo Yeast. Alas.
KM: Noooooo. I am impressed you even knew of this Turbo Yeast. I want some!
Stage One: Making Dough, Proving
CT: This was another very long bake, although I always expect Bread Week to be long, because there's always at least one stage of proving.
KM: To be honest, it was kind of short for bread! I feel like usually the bread challenges are three hours minimum, and this one came in at only two hours and 45 minutes. What I like about the bread challenges is that there is usually a little downtime, so we both baked Sunday evening, and I got takeout Indian food as a treat and ate it in the middle of my bake.
CT: Oh, that's lovely. Engaging naan mode!
KM: What was the first thing you did, Chris?
CT: I will admit that the sheer number of ingredients in the top part of the list freaked me out a little. I wasn't sure what honey and oil were doing in the dough, and I didn't feel like I had the intuition to make sense of it. So I decided to go Wet Bowl–Dry Bowl.
KM: I'm still not sure what those are doing in the dough. Even eggs are not necessary in donuts! A lot of bonus ingredients here, in my opinion.
CT: Yeah! So I put the two flours, the salt, and the yeast into a bowl, and kind of swirled that around. Then, in a saucepan, I began to warm the milk.
I wasn't sure what to do with the butter? The recipe has 50 grams of softened butter, but it seemed to me to kind of overlap with warmed milk in a weird way? I'm still confused by all of this. Note that I did not take my usual pre-bake gummy, so I was more flustered and ornery than usual.
KM: To me, butter has the potential to be wet, so I put the butter into the saucepan with the warmed milk and brought them both to not-very-hot.
I put the eggs, the honey, the oil, and the vanilla into the stand mixer for reasons that were mainly "Honey is sticky and I don't want to touch it." But then I ended up adding wet to dry, and then wet to dry again because I had two bowls of wet.
CT: That's interesting, adding the butter to the milk. I did not do this. I put the honey, oil, and vanilla into a small bowl, and I beat a couple eggs into another bowl, and then I just had this stupid little blob of butter.
I ran into trouble here. My milk was way too hot. It wasn't quite simmering, but it was just shy of simmering. I tried two things to cool it down, and neither of them was Wait Five Minutes.
KM: Noooo! The delicate Turbo Yeast!!!
CT: Right! I added the honey, oil, and vanilla to the milk, trying to bring the temperature down. Then I added a splash of cold milk. It still felt far too hot, but I am a stupid idiot and so I shrugged and went with it. I put the dry ingredients into the stand mixer with the dough hook, then I poured in the hot milk mixture, and started the hook. And then I just kinda dumped the blob of butter in there.
KM: Dough hook! I still don't have one of those, so I mixed my dough using my hands, which was TERRIBLE because the dough was so unbelievably sticky.
I tried using wet hands. I tried putting flour on my hands. In the end, nothing worked, and I just ended up covered in dough.
CT: It was really an unbelievably sticky dough. Also, because I had added an extra splash of cold milk to try to temper the hot milk, but then did not reduce the volume overall, I had too much liquid in my dough, right at the start. I tried to moderate this with dashes of flour, but I knew I was in big trouble, in part because I didn't really know what texture to shoot for.
KM: Oh god. I'm stressed just reading this. I really did not like the texture of this dough. It was unlike my normal donut dough and also way too sticky. But I was not really in the mood to try again, so I just put the dough into a clean oiled bowl, then into the oven with the oven light on, and went to eat my Indian food.
CT: There's a note that I see now on the official recipe that says "Turn the dough out and shape into a neat ball." LOL. Christ, I was WAY off the mark. My dough could never have formed a ball. It was like that sticky glow-in-the-dark slime that they used to sell from those coin-operated toy dispensers.
KM: Wow. I didn't do that. I just put my weird blobby guy into the bowl. It was way too sticky to become a ball. I have worked with high-hydration sourdough a bit, and what I have learned from that is that high-hydration doughs are not for me and I don't like them.
CT: I also put my dough into an oiled bowl, but instead of the oven I used the microwave for proving. I've had success with this in the past: I put the bowl, plus a mug of hot water (a Dayna Evans trick), plus a tea candle into the microwave, and closed it. I did not have confidence that my dough would rise, but I felt that if it had any chance of rising, this would do it.
Kelsey, how long were you prepared to proof this dough ball?
KM: I set a timer for 30 minutes, with the plan to proof for 45. I had used basically no time making my dough (less than 15 minutes), so I felt like I had plenty of time. In an ideal world, I would have let it proof for an hour, but I knew there had to be a second proof, and I wanted the dough to have plenty of time there. How long did you plan to proof for?
CT: Yikes. I'm checking the Slack record, and it appears that I needed 25 minutes to make the dough. Then I set my timer for one hour, for proving. The thing is, I think if we had not had a time limit, this probably would've been fine. On the other hand, when your yeast has been murdered and the self-rising agent has no chance in hell of lifting oil, eggs, honey, butter, and vanilla extract, it really doesn't matter at all whether you give it an hour to sit in a bowl. It's not rising!
KM: When did you realize your dough wasn't rising?
CT: The Slack record shows that 32 minutes in, I had developed the sense that my dough was dead. It had not risen at all. It had, if anything, sagged and pooled. Maybe, maybe there were a couple of granules of yeast that were forming little air pockets somewhere in there, but overall the dough was lifeless. I'd scalded the yeast quite literally to death.
KM: I'm truly amazed that you continued onward with this bake. I was so mad at Paul Hollywood for making us make donuts when I wanted a lovely loaf of bread that I almost certainly would have been like that guy who threw his cake in the trash.
CT: Iain! A legend and a role model, in my opinion.
Stage Two: Making Goops, Cutting Donuts, More Proving
CT: I assume you started on your goops during these proving sessions, or were you happily munching lamb korma?
KM: I did begin my goops. I ate my Indian food (yellow daal and papri chaat), then I went Goop Mode. I made the red icing for decoration in a bowl, which was quite easy, and then I made the chocolate ganache on the double boiler so it would have time to harden. I also did the dishes. Did you also begin your goops during the first proof?
CT: I did! I started with the vanilla glaze. For this, we were asked to use 600 fucking grams of icing sugar. I would really like to highlight once again just how hateful and obnoxious it is to sift 600 grams of icing sugar. I tried to use my real-deal sifter for this, but it sincerely would've taken me a week of pulling that stupid handle. I abandoned the sifter and instead used a mesh sieve, and formed Mount Sugar.
KM: Despite last week finding a real-deal sifter in my kitchen somewhere, this week it was nowhere to be found. I yet again used the mesh sieve to sift 600 damn grams of icing sugar. It is insane how much sugar this is, you're right.What's also upsetting is how long it takes. I had honestly blocked this whole process from my memory, because I'm so sick of icing sugar which gets all over my kitchen and makes everything so sweet.
CT: This recipe uses, in total, an astonishing 900 grams of icing sugar. I went from having a jar of icing sugar in my pantry plus half a bag, to having zero icing sugar. Infuriating.
KM: I went my own way. I only had to sift 600 grams of icing sugar, thank god. But I want to note that I have now bought icing sugar in the big bag three weeks in a row, and despite starting with a surplus of it, I am out again! Why!!
CT: Unacceptable!
After I'd sifted this huge mountain of sugar, I warmed up my coconut oil in a saucepan, then added this plus the vanilla extract to the sugar, and began whisking it. I then added milk, one tiny splash at a time.
This was sort of healing, after the awful dough experience. I felt I had a good handle on things, and eyeballing it sort of reestablished my capabilities as a baker.
KM: OK, we also differed on this, because I went ahead and added 100 ml of milk to begin. There was just so much sugar. This actually ended up being fine, because I needed even more milk than that to get the icing to a consistency I wanted. The consistency I was aiming for was Waterfall Of Donut Icing They Have In That Krispy Kreme Machine. I ended up needing 100 ml, plus like 15 splashes of milk to get there.
CT: I'm not sure how much I wound up using, but I'm sure we were close. I was so happy with the texture of this icing when I was finished. I became addicted for a short time to plunging the whisk down in there and then lifting it out and watching the icing drip down. Beautiful stuff.
KM: That sounds really nice. I would like to do that.
CT: How did your ganache process go?
KM: Great. I used an old method we used at some point where you just melt butter and warm milk and combine that with the double-boiler chocolate. It looked perfect. I was really happy to have made this choice, because 1) I actually wanted to eat the chocolate donut, and 2) I used dark chocolate so it had an actual flavor that wasn't just 600 grams of sugar.
CT: That sounds wonderful. I wish I'd gone chocolate mode. I was so jealous of you when you revealed this plot twist.
For my strawberry goop, I scooped some preserves into a narrow pitcher, then added 200 grams of icing sugar, and a splash of water, and plunged my immersion blender down in there.
I added more tiny splashes of water to loosen it, and kept at this until it was homogenized. But it looked a little too loose, so I added more icing sugar. I then also added a couple drops of pink food coloring, so that it would look right.
KM: Your strawberry goop sounds like it actually had a flavor to it. Did it taste very strawberry-y?
CT: Oh yeah, it sure did! It's pretty tasty. It's obviously very sweet, because it has a ton of sugar, but it tastes like strawberries, and there's none of that weird extract sting to it.
KM: OK, so not all was lost! You can dunk lots of things in strawberry icing.
CT: I poured off some of the icing into a separate bowl and added a couple drops of crimson food coloring, because we were supposed to have some decorative icing for the end. I felt very good about this whole process. I suspected that my strawberry icing would not behave like Paul intended, but it looked pink and tasted good, and I was fine with it.
KM: Now I will tell you about the bad thing that happened to me. Remember how I had made my red icing as one of my first goops, and it was sitting to the side next to the chocolate?
CT: I do remember this, yes.
KM: Some important context for my kitchen at this moment is that I had to have an exterminator come last week—great guy! Classical violinist! I’m obsessed with him!—because we have had a Mouse Problem. This is pretty common in South Philly and not the end of the world, but it did mean that there were a few snap traps on the counter. Snap traps, I have learned, are very scary and very loud. It was at this point, with the icing bowl in my hands that I moved something on the counter, and it hit a snap trap, which SNAPPED and then I basically tossed the icing bowl onto the counter because I was afraid a mouse had died and I was not in a position to deal with that, and also because the snap scared me there was then BRIGHT RED icing everywhere. I cleaned this up, and the only thing that got snapped was the trap itself, but it was not a good vibe for my bake to endure.
CT: Oh no. No!
I have also had to deal with mouse traps in my house, and they can truly shred the nerves.
KM: It's quite stunning how cartoonish the snap traps are! They're terrifying to set up and terrifying to hear go off. I kind of respect that about them. Do NOT tell me about ethical catch-and-release. I do not care! I do whatever Kevin the Violinist Exterminator tells me to do. He's my mouse boss.
CT: I assume somewhere during the cleaning of red icing apocalypse, your first proving session ended?
KM: Yeah, once the red icing was cleaned and I had set up the snap trap again and washed my hands a lot, I checked on my dough and it was all puffed up. This was only the 40-minute mark, but I compared it to the photo on my phone and it looked doubled in size, so I decided it would be better to let them proof longer on the second one. The dough was also way less sticky, so that was a welcome surprise.
CT: That's nice! I love to handle dough after it's poofed up during proving. A magical texture.
I did not have this happy experience, although thankfully I did not have red icing all over the place. I looked in on my dough after about 50 minutes, and if it had risen at all, it was by a few millimeters. I waited dutifully until the sounding of the timer, but only so that I could say that I'd done it. I knew it would not produce anything.
KM: I did in fact find more red icing while I was rolling out my dough, and had to stop then and clean up more. Everyone had their struggles. How did you go about shaping your donuts?
CT: I floured a big space on my counter, then scraped the dough down onto it. I used this opportunity to liberally dash self-rising flour onto the dough, in the hopes that it would at least dry it out somewhat and make it rollable. This worked a little. I sort of kneaded it around in the flour for a couple minutes, and then rolled it into a big flat blob. This might all have been wrong, for all I know. My dough was so far from what I wanted and expected that I just felt like I was flying blind.
KM: It's so funny: I did what I considered the Chris Thompson Method, but then you didn't do the method this time.
CT: I'm thrilled and delighted to discover that I have a signature method, and that it does not involve burning my house down.
KM: I put down butcher paper, floured that, and then put another butcher paper on top of it and just rolled out the dough. I didn't knead it!
CT: Very tidy, very nice. I considered this, but my dough was so slimy and wet, it was basically pourable. If I'd tried this method, I would've had dough stuck irretrievably across six feet of wasted parchment.
KM: Gross. Yuck!
CT: I used a drinking glass to cut circles from the dough, plunging it each time into the bag of flour to keep it from sticking.
Then I used a piping nozzle to cut out the inner circle. I think the glass was probably about three inches in diameter, and I think the nozzle was a little over an inch.
KM: I used one of my new cutters again, also dipping it in flour. But I did not have a small cutter to do the inside circles, and I made a stupid assumption here. My assumption was that when the dough puffed up, the center hole would get smaller, and then when they puffed up more in the oil, it would get smaller again, so I should make a bigger middle hole than I thought. Because of this, I used a shot glass to cut the center circle.
CT: Oh no, that seems too large!
KM: Well if my assumption that it would magically become smaller were correct, it would have been fine!
But my assumption was not correct. Because of this, I did end up with an abundance of donut holes, though. When all my dough went back into the oven to proof, I had 13 donuts and 16 donut holes, which perhaps proves that I should have made the donuts thicker.
CT: What was your proving setup this time? Did you cover the donuts at all?
KM: No! I don't have any proving bags, and am also not sure where one would buy those. When I proof actual bread, I just leave it on the counter for one million years under a cloth. So I just put the donuts into the oven uncovered. Did you have a bag?
CT: I used a kitchen garbage bag.
KM: I asked you about this in our chat, because it did occur to me that this was an option. Then we were out of trash bags, so I opened a new box and THE HORROR occurred: They were scented. I didn't use them.
CT: I wasn't going to do this garbage-bag hack, which I consider sort of gross, but I felt like I needed to try everything because my dough was so bad. I put the dough circles onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, wrapped that in a garbage bag, and put it into the oven, with the oven light on and also with two lit candles. I set the timer for 45 minutes.
KM: This is all so frustrating because it really does seem like you did everything right, except waiting five minutes for the milk to cool down.
CT: I've always been told that impatience is a virtue. One of these days, I should double-check the wording of that proverb.
Stage Three: Frying Donuts
KM: I decided to let my donuts proof for a full hour, but at the 40-minute mark, I put all the oil into the stock pot and set it over heat. I have made this mistake before on Thanksgiving, where I forget to heat the oil and then have to wait, but I overestimated how long it would take to get hot, so it was hot enough in like 15 minutes. Then I just had oil cooking on my stove top for 15 more minutes before the donuts were ready.
CT: Ha! I had basically the same issue. I started heating the oil pretty early in the bake because I was worried that I would forget later, but then I just had a cauldron of dangerously hot oil sitting on my stove for like 90 minutes.
KM: LOL! Why are we like this!
CT: I think it's an overcorrection from times in the past when we've forgotten to preheat our ovens and suffered for our foolishness. One of these days, after enough trial and error, we will get this right.
Did your dough circles get the full hour in there? How did you feel about them when they were done proving?
KM: They did get the full hour, but they did not really look puffy enough to me. I think my oven must have lost some of its heat from opening and closing it to get the donuts in there. I was not very happy with their puffiness, but they were puffier than before. This is also a beef I have with Paul: Donut dough doesn't really need to be enriched with eggs and honey. That just makes it harder to proof for no reason.
CT: That's exactly right. They wind up being a lot less pleasurable to eat this way, too, because they're less poofy due to all the enrichment. Or anyway, that's what I suspect. Mine were not going to be poofy. They may have relaxed some, but they did not noticeably grow in size during this phase.
KM: No, I agree. I was grateful to have a lot of donut holes, because this made it pretty easy for me to fry some of the holes as testers, then coat them in regular sugar and taste-test them.
CT: I had this scattered pile of dough leavings, and I had this pot of hot oil, and one thing led to another, and then another, and then several more.
KM: Yummm. Donut scraps in pot of hot oil.
CT: I told myself that I was testing the oil and that the frying was doing the job of keeping it in a good temperature range, but also I was stuffing my face with donut holes and random fried scraps of dough. A disturbing spectacle.
KM: To be clear, I felt unbelievably bad when this bake finished because of the mass of donut holes I ate during the process of "testing the oil" and "getting the timing right." I had to drink a little ginger ale after the bake was over, because my stomach was just full of sugar and very unhappy.
CT: How many actual donuts went into the oil at a time for you? I was using a big Dutch oven, so I felt comfortable frying four donuts at a time.
KM: I was using a big stock pot. I did one donut at first, because I made a mistake trying to get it into the oil and just kind of picked it up with my hands. This was a huge mistake. It not only deflated but became weirdly stretched. I did that one as a tester, then I did three at a time so that I would have room in the pot to flip them.
CT: I also had a donut-mangling accident at this stage, but because I only had 12 donuts I just had to let it ride. One of my donuts turned into a nearly perfect figure-eight. Another couple of them are almost square-shaped, from sticking to the parchment.
KM: The Thanksgiving donuts don't have this problem, so I was not prepared for it. Those, I just pick up with my hands and put in the oil, and they puff up beautifully. These were delicate, evil little things.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: Assembly for this one mostly meant dressing the donuts with icing, and then dressing them with more icing. It's interesting that time was never really much of a factor for either of us.
KM: Yeah, I actually left way too much time for the icing portion of the program because I assumed it would take forever. In reality, I could pour icing with a spoon over the still-warm donuts while the other ones were in the fryer, and then when all of them were iced I could decorate them.
Is that what you did?
CT: No, I did this differently. I had so much time left in my bake when I got to the frying part, I was honestly embarrassed to have been in such a hurry earlier on. I fried the donuts in three batches, then let them cool for a couple minutes on the rack. Then I hand-dipped them, one at a time, in the vanilla glaze, first one side and then the other. This worked fine.
KM: All my understanding of iced donuts comes from watching the Krispy Kreme conveyor belt, so I just assumed all of this was supposed to happen immediately. At Krispy Kreme, the icing is a waterfall, so I poured mine on top of the donuts. The bottom is not my business.
CT: I'm sure that was very satisfying, watching the icing melt down onto the donuts. Once all my donuts were glazed, I selected the least ugly of them, and gave these six a dunk in the pink icing.
KM: I did the opposite. I selected the six ugliest of mine and dunked them in chocolate, assuming the chocolate would cover the flaws.
Then I covered them in sprinkles. This was very satisfying. They looked quite cute!
CT: I once again used a condiment bottle for the decorative icing, and just sprayed it all over without much design. I also did sprinkles, because to me a pink donut should have some sprinkles on there. I was horrified when I looked at the timer and realized that I had no tasks left, but a whopping 21 minutes to go.
KM: Wow, you're so creative. I should get a condiment bottle. I put my newly made red icing into a piping bag unhappily, and squirted it in spirals on top of the glazed donuts. I had 12 minutes left on the clock when I finished.
CT: I noticed here at the end that my pink icing really was not setting, and so just to have something to do, I put my donuts in the freezer for five minutes. I realize that people tend to love a warm donut and not a very cold one, but I think I was feeling some pressure to somehow use some of this extra time. It's awful to think that I certainly could've made a second batch of dough way back in the beginning, with the 21 minutes I didn't need at the end.
KM: Don't think about that, in my opinion. Then you would have been upset at all your wasted dough.
The Finished Product
CT: How did you feel about your donuts at the end?
KM: I felt very happy about my decision to ignore the dreaded Paul Hollywood and make my chocolate donuts with sprinkles, but overall I felt disappointed. The recipe was, after all, not bread. How did you feel about yours?
CT: I was disappointed that I'd killed my yeast and produced thin, non-poofy donuts. But I guess this could've been so much worse. I knew from the munching of possibly 10 or more donut holes that the finished product would at least not be bad to eat. I mean, it's fried dough with sweet icing. They don't look great, but they go down just fine!
KM: Show donut?
CT: Here's donut:
KM: OMG the pink ones look pretty good to me. The glazed ones look like another type of donut that I can't remember, but have definitely seen at the donut store.
CT: The red decorative icing looks a little bit too much like ketchup, to me.
KM: Well, that's not your fault. That's the COLOR DEMANDED.
CT: Yeah, I'm blaming Paul for this one.
Reveal donuts?
KM: Here are my donuts:
CT: It's funny that you chose the ugly ones for the chocolate treatment, because those chocolate donuts look PERFECT to me. I would eat all six of them, and die.
KM: The chocolate hides all the flaws! I should have made them all chocolate. I regret listening to Paul Hollywood for even one second.
CT: If anything, I would say this bake has inspired me to make donuts again sometime, but using a different recipe that doesn't have so much stuff in it, and of course using milk that is warmed to a temperature that will not slaughter a bunch of unsuspecting yeast.
Did you get to eat a donut? Or were you too full of donut holes?
KM: I ate a donut the next morning. They were a hit in our house. The dough did actually have a nice flavor, and everyone loves sprinkles.
How did the donuts play in your home?
CT: My wife and child liked the donuts very much. My child had a pink one on her little breakfast plate when she came downstairs Monday morning, and you would've sworn it was an entire Christmas tree, judging by her reaction.
KM: I would have loved to see that. I'm so happy for her.
CT: She's in a real pink phase right now, and also she is still in a SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR phase, so this really hit the mark.
KM: Wow. One person who was thrilled we made donuts instead of bread. Thank god. This whole thing is redeemed.
CT: Kelsey, this next week will be a weird one, my friend. Are you prepared to learn the theme of our next technical bake?
KM: I'm scared. What is it?
CT: It's a brand-new theme: Back-to-School Week! Prue Leith says Paul Hollywood was very excited about this one. Ominous!
KM: Wow. I hope we get to make Fruit Roll-Ups, or better yet, those Little Debbie chocolate wafer cookies. Knowing the British, we will have to make some kind of garbage lemon crumble biscuit with a small drawing of a backpack on it.
CT: The British love to be nostalgic for something called Grumpkin Lumpies that contains seven kinds of burned sugar and at least one industrial byproduct.
KM: LMFAO. Not Grumpkin Lumpies. Can't wait to make six kinds of caramel and a prune filling for my delicious Grumpkin Lumpies next week!
