Adventures in Vegan Donuts
Have you ever made homemade yeast donuts before? If you haven’t, they’re totally worth the time and effort, I promise. I’ve made yeast donuts at home a handful of times, but I make them at work every Saturday for our boston cream donuts. I loooove making them, there’s something about working with yeasted doughs that I just really enjoy.
Last year I came up with my own top secret donut recipe, which we now use at My Vegan Sweet Tooth, and oh man are they delicious. Unfortunately today I’m not sharing that recipe, but rather a story involving these donuts.
My mom is a substitute teacher and she has been a long term substitute in a ninth grade english class for the spring semester, but today is her last day in the class before the teacher comes back from maternity leave. The kids have grown to love her, because she’s the best ever, and she wanted to do something fun for them on her last day in the class. She asked me about a month ago if I wanted to make donuts for all the kids for her last day, and of course I said heck yeah!
Fast forward to last week, I realized that I was going to make 75 yeast donuts in my tiny apartment kitchen all by myself. That’s a lot of flippin’ donuts!! My mom even bought me a fryer just for the occasion. After doing the math of how many batches of dough I would need to make, I decided to just buy a 50 pound bag of flour from restaurant depot, along with a huge bag of powdered sugar for the glaze.
I started making the dough around 1pm and alternated each batch by about 30 minutes. Overall it took me about 8 hours to make all the dough and fry all the donuts. Luckily, it was a beautiful day that I got to spend out on the fire escape with my donuts, dancing around to 80s music. The hardest part of the whole thing was just trying to make all the donuts fit in my little kitchen; I took over all the available counter space in the entire kitchen!
After I finally finished frying all the donuts, I did a little clean-up and prepared the kitchen for the glazing of the donuts. This time I covered every inch of open counter space in paper towels, and started dipping donuts in the glaze. I had a pretty good system going, but I ended up having to do this in two batches because apparently 75 donuts take up A LOT of counter space, who knew?
I apologized to my roommates for taking over the entire kitchen by giving them as many of the donut holes and their hearts desired, and they gladly accepted my apology. They also kept me company throughout the whole process! By the time I finished glazing all the donuts, it was 11:30 and by midnight I had all of them packed up and ready to go! Although, once I saw how many donuts I had to transport I began to question if they would all fit into my teeny tiny smart car.
All of this leads up to today, when I took the donuts to my mom’s school. And yes, I did manage to fit all those donuts in my car without any casualties! I did have to drive pretty slow around corners though to keep them from sliding all over the place. The donuts were a hit with the kids, who were very skeptical of vegan donuts, and now I have the rest of a 50 pound bag of flour to use. While I am insanely exhausted after all those donuts, it was actually a lot of fun and I feel like I rose up to the challenge pretty well. But in the future, I might need a bigger fryer….
Oh, and I’m thinking about making this type of post a more regular thing. More stories of adventures in cooking, or whatever life may throw at me. There will definitely still be recipes as well, but I hope you also enjoy these little snippets of my life!
-Hunter