Like hockey pucks--Raised Doughnuts and Doughnut Holes

Raised Doughnuts and Doughnut Holes
The All-New Ultimate Bread Machine Cookbook Copyright 1999

1 recipe chilled Classic Brioche Dough
2 quarts vegetable oil, for frying

Topping:
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, optional

1. Lightly dust work surface with flour. Roll dough into 16-inch circle, approximately ¼ inch thick.
2. Using a 3-inch-round doughnut cutter, cut out as many doughnuts as possible. If you do not have a doughnut cutter, use a 3-inch round biscuit cutter to cut out the doughnuts, and a 1-inch-round cutter to cut out the holes. Place doughnuts and holes on a baking sheet. Gather the scraps, reroll and cut.
3. Heat 2 inches oil to 360 degrees F in a heavy-bottomed 3-quart saucepan. Fry 3 doughnuts and a few holes at a time, 1 to 2 minutes on each side, or until golden brown. To get doughnuts to really puff up while frying, dunk them under the oil a couple of times with a slotted spoon.
4. Remove with a slotted spoon and let drain on a wire rack resting on a baking pan. Let oil recover to 360 degrees F before frying the next batch.
5. Roll warm doughnuts and holes in sugar. Of desired, mix ground cinnamon with sugar.

Classic Brioche Dough (made in the bread machine)

1/3 cup milk
3 extra-large eggs
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons sugar
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups bread flour
2 1/4 teaspoons dry yeast

All ingredients must be at room temperature. Liquid ingredients should be about 80 degrees.

Cut butter into tablespoonsful. Add ingredients in the order specified in your bread machine owner's manual, adding just 4 tablespoons of butter to start. Do not use delay bake function.

Select manual/dough.

Add the remaining butter during the first kneading, 2 tablespoons at a time after the dough comes together in a ball.

At the end of the program, punch down dough. Let dough rest 5 minutes.

Butter a 3-quart bowl. Place dough in bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Refrigerate 12 to 24 hours.
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Happy Fat Tuesday! Around here doughnuts are the big thing and all the bakeries and many churches are busy making fashnachts (doughnuts). Since I don't have a connection to any of the great church fashnachts and the supermarket ones are just so-so, this is the second year I'm trying to make my own. Last year's were just okay, this year's were worse! I don't know what went wrong but these are like little hockey pucks. The dough was so stiff (which makes sense with all that butter and the chilling).

There was plenty of room for error. I bought this cookbook online before I started using my bread machine and the recipes are too big for my 1-pound loaf pans. I had to break this recipe in half. Otherwise, I followed it pretty closely but I ended up with very dense doughnuts. My husband ate these warm and loved them. He asked me to make more but what does he know? Oh, and those darn holes. Absolutely impossible to flip over and even denser.

Oh well. Maybe next year. I have an old Amish cookbook with many doughnut recipes but the instructions are too vague. I'll have to experiment.

Blast From The Past: Salisbury Steak Deluxe from June 2007. I was thinking about making this again this week but never got around to looking up the recipe. Good thing I guess because last night my husband knocked the horseradish off the fridge shelf and it ended up all over the floor.

Question of the Day: Have you had any recipe failures lately?