Spudnuts

Review by Rachael:

Spudnuts:
4 c. milk
1 c. sugar
1 c. shortening
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1 Tbl. vanilla
2 pkg. yeast
1 c. warm potato water (water that potatoes have been boiled in)
1 c. mashed potato

Mix the above ingredients and let set about 30 minutes or until foamy.

Then add:
4 well beaten eggs
1 Tbl. salt
12 c. flour

Knead, let rise until double in size. Roll out about 3/4" thick, cut as for doughnuts (we used two different sizes of circle cookie cutters). Let rise until double in size. Cook in hot vegetable oil, flipping when one side is golden. While still hot dip, in glaze.

Glaze:
1/2 c. boiling water
1 lb. powdered sugar
2 tbsp. butter
2 tbsp. vanilla

Chocolate Glaze:
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
4 Tbl. unsweetened cocoa powder
3 Tbl. milk or water
2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

In a medium bowl, whisk together powdered sugar and cocoa powder. Slowly stir in milk and vanilla extract. Whisk until silky and smooth. If you need a touch more milk to make this a dippable glaze, add a bit more. Dip doughnuts in chocolate glaze and let rest to harden slightly.

When I found this recipe online it said to try half a batch if you weren't feeding a lot of people. I listened to this advice since it is my first attempt at making them. I mixed all ingredients together as directed and I found that it was a bit lumpy. So I took out a wire whisk and thought maybe that would help. But as you can see it just made smaller curds. Who am I to mess with the recipe, so I decided to let it sit for the 30 minutes.

Times up let's see what happens! I added the egg salt and flour. The flour didn't seem to be enough so we kept adding hoping it would help. It took a lot more flour than the recipe said it would to get the dough workable. Once it looked good I left it to rise. It never did get double its size. Although I only left it for two hours, maybe that's not long enough.

Rolling it out and making the cutouts was the easy part. Getting your oil to the right temperature took a little bit of work. Luckily, Jason was manning the "oil station" and he did an awesome job.

While Jason was cooking I started making the chocolate glaze. Perhaps I put just a little bit too much milk in because it was runny. We also decided to do a sugar and cinnamon mix and put that on top of some of the donuts.  Once they were cooked and started cooling off we started putting on the glaze & cinnamon sugar mix.

They turned out really well & half a batch made a little over 4 dozen donuts plus all the donut holes. We were split 50-50 on if the chocolate was better or the cinnamon sugar. I would try the other glaze listed on the recipe next time we make them. But a fair warning it will take you a long time from start to finish.

Not sure how you are supposed to store donuts but I did it wrong. The donuts were good on the first day when we made them. To store them I just put them in old ice cream pales with lids. Well that made them soggy, so I took the lids off for a while to see if they would dry out a bit & then they got stale FAST. The cinnamon sugar ones were still half way edible but the chocolate ones were done for. We threw them out, which was a huge waste.