Doughnuts are the number one thing people in Germany eat at this time of year. Like in other pre-Lent celebrations around the world, fatty foods were created to use up the rich foods in the cupboards before the traditional fasting period. For example, in England, we eat pancakes every year on Shrove Tuesday (the day before Lent). As I now live in Germany though, who am I to deny the traditional doughnut?
Side note – the name creates a lot of argument in Germany. It’s never a doughnut, but often a Berliner, sometimes a Krapfen, and where I live in Hessen, always a Kreppel. Nobody can agree!
I’ve made doughnuts a few times over the years and always use the same demi-brioche dough from an old recipe. It’s reliable, versatile, and allows me to make a small batch of doughnuts whilst still having dough left over for something else.
Even the dough was fine to work with, I ended up with some pretty weird-looking doughnuts! For some reason this year, they started to crack when they were in the oil. I’m not sure where the problem was, whether it was a problem with the temperature of the oil or the dough itself. The dough was as normal inside though: soft, fluffy, and delicious.
Crullers
I have a healthy fear of bubbling oil, so I only deep-fry once a year when I make doughnuts. This means I get to play around with deep-frying other things that might have caught my attention. I saw in Nicola Lamb’s Sift a recipe for crullers – a choux-based deep-fried doughnut. I also figured if I was making choux I could whip up some basic churros too! Fried carbs for days! My piping skills aren’t the greatest so the crullers didn’t like quite as good as the ones in the book, but once I’d added a cinnamon glaze or rolled them in some cinnamon sugar, they were transformed. They were crisp on the outside, and airy light inside. In fact, they were so light, that it was easy to polish off a few at a time!
Bonus – Fried Panettone
After I’ve spent a bit of time frying I get excited. “This is so easy, why am I scared of this? Let’s fry everything!” And that friends is how I ended up deep-frying a small panettone on a random day in early March.
Was it delicious? How could it not be once I’d rolled it in cinnamon sugar? Did I regret it? Absolutely. I can’t say I felt great after all this fried food. Thankfully my husband was on hand to eat the rest!
