Baked Ring Doughnuts

Doughnuts are surprisingly easy to make - at least baked ring doughnuts are! I'd like to have a go at filled doughnuts at some point but the baked kind are definitely healthier than the deep fried ones and you can still make them look really pretty (and they taste good!) so I think this is a good place to start.

I was recently sent a selection of products to review from a German company called MeinCupcake, which also has the UK site CakeMart - if you haven't visited their website before I encourage you to take a look around, you might be surprised by what you find! They have a really wide range of products, for instance cookie cutters in every shape you can think of, and all sorts of other baking and cake decorating equipment.

I received this Wilton-branded doughnut pan from them to review and I knew immediately from the Wilton name that it would be good. I sprayed the pan with Cake Release and the doughnuts came out so easily and were perfectly shaped and golden brown. The only downside is that you can only make six at a time so you have to do a few batches -but I think I prefer these to the mini doughnut size and the pan is actually a good size to put away in the cupboard.

The pan comes with a recipe inside the card and that's what I used to make these doughnuts, though I used self-raising flour instead of 'cake flour' (it's an American recipe) and baking powder, used caster sugar as I don't keep granulated, and I didn't have any buttermilk so I made my own from milk and a squeeze of lemon juice.

This quantity made 14 doughnuts:
2 cups self-raising flour
3/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 eggs
2 tbsp. butter, melted
to decorate:
icing sugar and water, sprinkles
100g milk chocolate

Preheat oven to 180C. Spray a doughnut pan with Cake Release or similar.

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl and beat until well combined. Using a teaspoon carefully spoon the mixture into the pan making sure you don't cover the centre of the doughnut.

Bake for 7-9 minutes until golden brown. Remove from the tin to cool and repeat with the remaining mixture.

I decorated half of the doughnuts with white icing (icing sugar mixed with water) and coloured sprinkles from Dr. Oetker which looked really pretty. I decided the ones with the thicker icing looked better.

I then melted 100g milk chocolate in a bowl in the microwave and took the remaining doughnuts and dipped them directly into the melted chocolate. This gave a very even coating and I thought they looked really good.

I was going to visit some friends and meet their new baby at the weekend so I decided to take these doughnuts - well, most of them - as a gift.

Thanks to CakeMart for sending me the doughnut pan to review.

These doughnuts are quite cake-y and I think they are pretty, particularly the ones with the sprinkles, so I am sharing these with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK, as the theme is 'colour me pretty'.