Heart Shaped Doughnuts!

June 12th, 2009

If you’re up on all your doughnut news, you would know that the first Friday in June is always National Doughnut Day. So In order to celebrate, Mr. Project and I left the house last friday night in search for a doughnut shop.

Now finding doughnut shops in San Francisco is not a difficult thing to do. I’ve never seen so many doughnut shops – there seems to be one on every block around these parts. But we wanted to find a “designer” doughnut shop. So we headed out to Dynamo Donut. If you clicked on that link, you’ll notice two things, 1. They are located in the GHETTO. Seriously. I think we took our lives into our hands for this doughnut run at 9 pm. And 2. that there is no “hours of operation” on the website. So silly me, I assumed they were open till all hours of the night (like most doughnut shops here). However, they were not open late, in fact they close around 6pm, 6PM! Thats insane in the doughnut world! So we risked our lives for nothing!

So not as to be defeated, we searched for doughnuts on our snazzy iphones. We came across an “Eagle Donut” with a 5 star rating that was on Mission St. So once again assuming that all doughnut shops are open late, we decided to check it out. After finding a parking spot a few blocks away, we made the trek uphill to Eagle Donut, which we then found out was also closed! Such devastating news on this National Doughnut Day. So sad. So by this time it was close to 11, and we really didn’t care about doughnuts any more. So we decided to call it a night.

Fast Forward to Tuesday of this week (June 9th) I was thinking about our tragic celebration of National Doughnut Day and said to Mr. Project, “Why didn’t we MAKE doughnuts on national doughnut day??” To which he said, “why don’t you make doughnuts tonight?” Which I thought was a brilliant idea. So while I was cooking dinner, I threw these ingredients into my breadmaker:

*   1 1/4 cups milk

* 1 beaten egg

* 1/4 cup shortening

* 1/4 cup sugar

* 1 teaspoon salt

* 3 1/2 cups white flour

* 1 1/2 teaspoons dry yeast

I set the breadmaker on the “dough” setting and when it was done, I Pulled out the dough and rolled it out to about 3/8″.  I then found my snazzy nesting heart cookie cutters and went to work:

I cut the big heats with little hearts in the centers (to be used as doughnut holes). And I also cut medium sized hearts to be made into Beignets. Once they were cut, I seperated them all out of the dough to give them room to raise. They all looked really adorable and I hoped they would actually keep there shape through the whole process. I then put a cloth over them to keep them warm, and then I let them raise for about 45 minutes. Here is what they looked like after about 45 minutes:

While they were raising, I put together the “toppings.” Mr. Project requested “lemon glaze” to make that I mixed powdered sugar & lemon juice. Then I made a cinnamon sugar mixture, and also a cream cheese glaze out of some cream cheese frosting I had in the fridge that I mixed with a little bit of water to give it the right consistency.

As I pulled them out of the oil, I had some paper towels ready to soak up any excess oil. Here they are all looking cute and fried. I think they puffed up really well in the oil.

Now the fun part! The sugar! Look how well they held their shape! The hearts looks fantastic!

And the glaze!

And the final product! These turned out so super cute! Such a creative way to make doughnuts and super easy! Who says doughnuts have to be round??