Donuts Are Delicious

In Baking, Family, Miscellany on 15 November 2009 with no comments

The best place to get donuts in Austin is Mrs. Johnson’s bak­ery. They keep weird hours, appeal­ing, osten­si­bly, to the 420 crowd, but the donuts are soft and fluffy and not too sweet. Good tex­ture, good taste, and they always give you a nice, hot glazed to eat in your car along with the rest of your order.

We didn’t make it out to Mrs. Johnson’s today, though. These donuts came from Super Donut in Bastrop, which while not 5-star wor­thy, are still super yummy.

Occasionally I bake donuts. Or rather, fry them. The trou­ble with mak­ing donuts is two-fold. One, I’m, ter­ri­fied of hot oil. Like, sweaty palms and but­ter­flies in my stom­ach scared of it. Have you ever seen that episode of Mythbusters where they put jaw­break­ers in the microwave and then put pres­sure on them, caus­ing them to explode? Remember when the intern got the 200+ degree melted sugar splashed on her face and neck? And remem­ber how she went scream­ing out of the room?

That’s what I always think about when the oil starts heat­ing up. And to answer your ques­tion, no, I don’t cook bacon.

Anyway, the hot oil is only the first prob­lem. The sec­ond prob­lem is that donuts are only good within the first two hours of tak­ing them out of the hot oil. After that they’re just sort of mediocre, and in my opin­ion, not worth the calo­ries. And given that they’re a lot of work to pre­pare (like many yeast-based breads) I just don’t think they’re worth it.

However, I have some very fond mem­o­ries of home­made donuts from child­hood. My mother used to take us camp­ing a lot, and one of the things we made were camper’s donuts. You take a roll of those refrig­er­ated bis­cuits, (you know, the kind where you peel the paper off the can and then bang the can against the edge of the counter until it POP!s open) pop a hole out of the mid­dle, deep fry those suck­ers, and then frost them with store-bought cake frost­ing and sprin­kles. Super sweet. Tooth-achingly so. And prob­a­bly, to an adult palette, inedible.

But my oh my they were good when I was a kid. Every time I have a donut I think of them.

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