It's been pretty smooth sailing so far on this voyage, but let's not get carried away - we haven't exactly been challenging ourselves. And that's by design: starting out with incredibly complex dishes wouldn't have been very smart. If the wheels are going to come off (to mix my metaphors) it's going to be with something like today's adventure: chocolate-filled doughnuts.
There is, after all, an entire industry devoted to selling you doughnuts so that you don't have to make them yourself. They're not something you just whip up on an impulse. And besides, if we all made our own doughnuts, where would the cops hang out?
But we're nothing if not foolhardy - plus, chocolate - so we gave it a shot. First step, making the dough. Flour and sugar were sifted together, then mixed with warm milk and melted butter, plus the all important yeast, which had been waking up in a small dish of warm milk.
With the dough made, we found ourselves with nothing to do for an hour. See above re: not an impulse recipe. Eventually though, the dough didst rise, and we were ready for stage 2: deep frying!
Before it could be fried, we had to cut the dough into "pillow" shapes - as you can see, I use weirdly shaped pillows. But they'll taste just as good!
So far so good, but these aren't just plain doughnuts, they're chocolate filled, so we need to have the filling ready to go when they come out of the pan. Luckily that's just a matter of pouring hot sweetened cream over chocolate chips and stirring. And yes, that's just as delicious as it sounds.
Into the fryer, then! It takes an unreasonable amount of oil to deep fry things, it turns out. Add that to the inescapable feeling that you're going to burn the house down, and you see yet another reason why you just don't do this at home.
Somehow we made it through without even a small fire (a little disappointing), and were left with just one more hurdle: getting the chocolate inside the doughnuts. Did I mention that neither of us has ever used a piping bag before? I think you can imagine the mess; it's amazing that our hands were clean enough to touch the camera at this point.
All's well that ends well, though, and all's even better that ends doughnuts.
Next time, we make up for these empty calories with a lentil and courgette salad - better than it sounds!
There is, after all, an entire industry devoted to selling you doughnuts so that you don't have to make them yourself. They're not something you just whip up on an impulse. And besides, if we all made our own doughnuts, where would the cops hang out?
But we're nothing if not foolhardy - plus, chocolate - so we gave it a shot. First step, making the dough. Flour and sugar were sifted together, then mixed with warm milk and melted butter, plus the all important yeast, which had been waking up in a small dish of warm milk.
With the dough made, we found ourselves with nothing to do for an hour. See above re: not an impulse recipe. Eventually though, the dough didst rise, and we were ready for stage 2: deep frying!
Before it could be fried, we had to cut the dough into "pillow" shapes - as you can see, I use weirdly shaped pillows. But they'll taste just as good!
So far so good, but these aren't just plain doughnuts, they're chocolate filled, so we need to have the filling ready to go when they come out of the pan. Luckily that's just a matter of pouring hot sweetened cream over chocolate chips and stirring. And yes, that's just as delicious as it sounds.
Into the fryer, then! It takes an unreasonable amount of oil to deep fry things, it turns out. Add that to the inescapable feeling that you're going to burn the house down, and you see yet another reason why you just don't do this at home.
Somehow we made it through without even a small fire (a little disappointing), and were left with just one more hurdle: getting the chocolate inside the doughnuts. Did I mention that neither of us has ever used a piping bag before? I think you can imagine the mess; it's amazing that our hands were clean enough to touch the camera at this point.
All's well that ends well, though, and all's even better that ends doughnuts.
Next time, we make up for these empty calories with a lentil and courgette salad - better than it sounds!
I read "cougarette" and got disappointed. Band name idea: Mary Jo and the Cougarettes.
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