Jessica Segarra - Mini Donuts: 100 Bite-Sized Donut Recipes to Sweeten Your Hole Day

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Like you, I am and will always be a home cook and baker. I dont use crazy kitchen tools, extremely rare ingredients, or difficult techniqueswhich means that all the recipes found in Mini Donuts are approachable and easily achieved. All you have to do to make your own amazing mini donuts is give the recipes a try!

In keeping with this mindset, when developing these recipes, I tried to keep the busy woman in the back of my mind. Would she have cake flour? No, but she likely has regular, all-purpose flour. Would she have a specialty creamed honey? Probably not, but a big jar of local honey might be sitting in her cupboard. Is a fancy fruit, in season for only two weeks of the year, ripening on her counter? Probably not. The ingredients used in the following recipes are regular, everyday staples in most kitchens. If you dont have something, it can be easily found in your local grocery storeor, in some cases, your local liquor store. In addition, none of the ingredients costs an arm and a leg!

That said, there are a few items that you want to be familiar with before you start your mini-donut journey.

You dont need to have a kitchen filled with every fancy culinary toy on the market to successfully recreate these recipes. In fact, all you really need are the following:

• Baking racks
• Deep fryer
• Mini-donut machine or mini-donut pan
• Piping bag and round tip
• Sifter
• Stand mixer
• Wax paper

All of these items will increase your success of making perfect mini-donuts, every single time!

The recipes in this cookbook use three different methods of cooking mini donuts: the donut pan, the mini-donut machine, and the frying method. Each method gives your mini donut a different type of texture.

• The donut pan produces a mini donut with a light, airy, cupcake-like texture.
• The mini-donut machine creates a more dense, cakelike donut with a perfectly rounded top.
• The frying method, either in a deep fryer or a deep pan with hot oil, creates a donut very similar to those you most often find in a donut shop.

Its important to keep in mind that each of these methods uses different preparation techniques, as discussed below. Try them all to find which texture and technique you like best.

When baking mini donuts in your donut pan, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Grease it. Greasing your mini-donut pan is imperative. There are a great number of ways to grease it, but the best ways are to grease the pan with butter, with the aerosol spray Bakers Joy, or with a napkin and a little vegetable oil.
• Overfilling is a crime. Do not overfill the mini-donut indentations with batter. When they are overfilled, the donuts tend to bake up over the edges and grow out instead of up, giving you flat mini mushrooms.
• Know your oven. If your oven tends to get hotter on one side, be sure to rotate the donut pan halfway through the baking time. On the other hand, if your oven usually takes a little longer to bake than the time a recipe calls for, bump up the heat by 10F to make up for it.

When baking donuts in your mini-donut machine, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Know your nonstick. Most of the mini-donut machines are nonstick. If yours isntor if your donuts are stickingspray a little Bakers Joy on it before each round of donuts are baked.
• Work fast. Because of the high heat, getting the batter into all six donut indentations swiftly is imperative. To do this, pipe the batter in with a piping bag or Ziploc bag with the tip cut off the end. Otherwise, the donuts begin to cook before you are ready to close the lid, and they tend to bake over the edges while you are trying to fill the rest of the indentions.
• Flip it. Most donut machines do not cook as evenly as you would like: one side of the donut is usually a little harder than the other. To help offset that issue, flip the donut halfway through baking, using a toothpick or the two-pronged fork included with your machine.