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Grapefruit Donuts

By on Thursday, May 16, 2013
Remember my absolute obsessive love over pastries? Couple that with the weekend and you get me trying my hand at all sorts of crazy carb-infused recipes to replace the lack of good places to go in Denver. 

A few weeks ago I had my sister and her boyfriend over for breakfast, so made grapefruit donuts (inspired by one of my favorite blogs A Beautiful Mess, except I didn’t have half the cool stuff they used to make the donuts, so I improvised a LOT). It was pretty time intensive but well worth it. If you’re a little freaked out about the idea of grapefruit in your donuts like my friend Lucy, never fear- this wasn’t TOO grapefruit flavored, it just had a nice zing to it.

Grapefruit Donuts (and some donut holes!)

1 c. milk
3 tbsp. grapefruit juice
1/4 c. sugar
2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast
2 eggs
1/2 c. butter
4 c. flour
4 c. canola oil (for frying!)
1) Warm milk and grapefruit juice in a medium-sized bowl for 30 seconds, until warm.
2) Stir in sugar until is dissolves in the milk/juice mix. 
3) Add yeast and mix well. Let sit for 5 minutes, until the mixture is frothy.
4) Melt butter in another large bowl. 
5) Stir eggs in butter mixture with a wire whisk. Add yeast mixture. (If you have an electric mixer, now is the time to whip it out, but I hand mixed because I hate washing electric mixers and it still turned out fine.
6) Add flour one cup at a time. Mix dough for 8-10 minutes. If you’re mixing with a whisk rather than electric mixer, after about 4 minutes you can start kneading by hand.

7) The dough should be airy and loose. Add more flour by the teaspoon if it is too liquid-y and keep kneading.
8) Place the dough in a lightly buttered bowl, cover and refrigerate overnight. (This is a critical step that I missed out on when I started making these a few weeks back; so I had to halt progress and do it all over again the next weekend!)

In the morning…
1) Roll out the dough while it is still cold. I rolled mine until it was about 1/2 inch thick.
2) Cut the donuts. I used an empty tin can because I don’t have a biscuit cutter, and used the cap of an olive oil bottle to cut the holes! Talk about improvisation.
3) Fill a deep pan (I used a wok) with the canola oil. Add more if necessary, you want the donuts to float in the oil. The oil should reach about 350 degrees F before you start to fry the donuts; I just eyeballed the oil, it was a rolling boil so it seemed to work. If you have a candy thermometer, you’d be better off, though!
4) Drop in donuts and holes and fry for 30-45 seconds on each side. As you can see below, 45 seconds gives you darker, crispy donuts while 30 seconds give you lighter colors.
5) Set aside on baking sheet to cool.

 Grapefruit Frosting

1/4 c. grapefruit juice
2 1/2 c. powdered sugar

1) Whisk sugar and grapefruit juice together in medium sized bowl until well mixed. Glaze should be thin, but not too liquidy. 
2) Dip donuts and holes in the frosting. I double-dipped the donuts for extra sweetness, but this is where you get most of the grapefruit flavor, so use sparingly if you aren’t sure how you feel about the grapefruit. Or experiment and double, triple, quadruple dip some and dip others only once!
3) Wait about 20 minutes until the glaze completely dries on the donut and then ENJOY.

This recipe made about 24 donuts, and between the four of us, they were gone in about six hours! Like I said, it was time intensive, but well worth it- and it was the weekend, so I had a little time to kill anyway!

How do you plan on spending your weekend?

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Comments

  6. Anonymous

    Donuts are always very delicious, I am a huge fan of donuts but I don't know how to make it.

    Thanks for the recipe.

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