Donuts are always a welcome breakfast treat as far as I’m concerned and I enjoy both fried and baked donuts. Baked donuts are a bit lighter than their fried counterparts and they’re easier to make at home, since you don’t need to worry about the temperature of your oil or about making a mess as you move bits of fried dough around. Baked donuts are baked in a specially shaped pan that forms the dough into rings and the pans are available in many sizes, some similar to full sized donuts and some that bake up minis. Mini donuts, which are nearly bite sized, are fun to make and to eat and you’ll find plenty of recipes to put your mini donut pan to good use in Mini Donuts: 100 Bite-Sized Donut Recipes to Sweeten Your “Hole” Day.
If you don’t already have one, pick up a mini donut pan. Like mini muffin pans, these don’t take up much room and you can scale down a recipe for a full sized baked donut, so the pan is more versatile that it might seem at first glance. The book opens with a quich crash course in mini donut making, which will help you ensure that your donuts pop out looking picture-perfect, before jumping into the recipes. There are dozens of recipes in a wide variety of flavors, starting with classics like Cinnamon Sugar and including more “exotic” flavors like Coconut-Lime and Orange Soda. There should be something for just about everyone – and there are plenty of photos to illustrate what the donuts will look like when they are finished.
After all this talk about baked donuts, I should point out that there are some recipes for fried mini donuts in this book, as well. The fried donuts are a bit more traditional and give you a nice alternative to a baked donut when you have some extra time to spend in the kitchen. The fried donut recipes are written with the same attention to detail and it’s great to have both options to choose from.
What do you think?