Chocolate Baked Donuts

These donuts are the best start to the week that I can think of. And of course, I like any excuse to use my donut pan. Of all the slightly frivolous items I have in my baking cupboards, this is one of my favourites. Its niche – I know. But I’m slowly realising that there are so many wonderful ways to bake ring-shaped delicious things.

All stacked and ready to be iced!

I decided to go completely decadent and make chocolate donuts with gorgeous glazes. The thing I adore about donuts is that you can dress them up so prettily and there are so many topping combinations! 

I went with AAAALL the sprinkles I had in my cupboard, but next time I am going to chop up some hazelnuts and throw them on the chcolate ones, and I'm definitely adding nutella to the icing recipe. And then the time after that I'm going to add so much coconut.

See, I'm getting huge amounts of use out of the two (TWO!) donuts pans I just had to own. A totally rational purchase! I highly recommend them.

 Makes 18 donuts

Ingredients for the Donuts

• 275g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp bicarb of soda
• 45g cocoa powder
• Pinch salt
• ½ tsp nutmeg
• 175g caster sugar
• 1 tbsp vanilla sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 300ml buttermilk
• 100ml vegetable oil

Ingredients for the Chocolate Glaze

• 100g chocolate chips
• 30g butter
• 1 tbsp golden syrup

Ingredients for the Pink Icing

• 250g icing sugar
• 40g butter, melted and allowed to cool slightly
• 2tbsp milk
• 1 tbsp yogurt
• Pinch salt
• Pinch vanilla sugar
• Few drops of red food colouring

Method

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees. Grease the holes of a donut pan.

For the donuts, mix together 150g of the flour, and all of the baking powder, bicarb, cocoa powder, salt and nutmeg. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, briefly whisk the eggs and yolks together with the sugars. Add this to the flour mixture, and pour in the buttermilk and oil and stir well. 

Add in the remaining flour, remembering you want a consistency that is slightly thinner than regular cake batter.

Spoon or pipe this into the prepared donut pan. You want it to be about ½ full, this mixture will rise!

Bake for 12 minutes.

I told you it would rise...

Remove from the oven and let sit for 5-10 minutes in the pan before turning out onto a wire rack.

When totally cooled, ice these suckers!

For the chocolate icing, place the ingredients in a bowl and microwave in 15-20 second blasts until all melted together and smooth, it only took me about 40 seconds to achieve this as I used choc chips which melted so quickly.

For the pink icing, mix all the ingredients together.

To glaze the donuts, dip them in your preferred and prepared icing and swirl it around to get the top half all covered.

Put on a cooling rack, sprinkle with whatever little additions you like, and allow to set. I went a bit mad, with chocolate sprinkles, regular sprinkles, hundreds and thousands, chocolate stars, and glitter!!