Friday, January 25, 2008

My Chronic Doofality

I am a doofus. Complete and utter. I thinks it's chronic.

Yesterday, while napping with Lydia, I dreampt of an old fashioned donut. The kind that's a slightly irregular round circle, with lots of slightly hardened glaze on, that has lots of little edges to catch and pool the glaze. The kind that tastes delicious with a nice glass of milk. The kind that is definitively American, and not found in Britain at all.

Except there is a Krispy Kreme's here in town. And they do have old fashioned donuts - they're even sour cream ones. But every Krispy Kreme donut is a pound ten (1.10 british pounds), or $2.20. Which to me is way too much for a donut.

So after I woke up, I stayed in bed dreaming about these donuts, OFD for short, until I finally got up. An hour later found me on the internet, looking at donuts, and donut recipes, and chatting with Michele, who was sitting in the cougar eat at the time, and was so influenced by my loving descriptions of OFDs that she went and bought herself one at that very time. She ate it on my behalf, which I appreciated, but did not solve my craving. Finally I found a good recipe online that used both sour cream and buttermilk, so was clearly the height of luxury.

Luckily last night was grocery shopping night, and so I bought any missing ingredients, and came home very excited about my donuts in potentia. I know that homemade donuts are never the same as storebought, but I hoped that this once the stars would align and they would come close.
This morning I carefully pulled out all of the ingredients beforehand, like a good chef, and I made the glaze ahead of time, so that it would be all ready when the donuts were coming out, and I wouldn't get flustered. I carefully transposed the ingredients to British measurements where needed, and then I assembled my dough. I used an old recipe, so it just states 'add flour until it makes a soft dough.' I did just that, and then cooked them, glazed them, and ended up with countless donuts. It turns out it was a large recipe as well.

After they had cooled Lydia and I tried them out, and they were a bit tougher than I was expecting, and nothing really at all like the OFDs that I had been craving, but they were still donuts, and still good, so I had a few, as did she. OFDs use a cake batter, that is usually pretty yellow, and these ones were a pale white, which I thought a little odd, but all of my cooking is odd in England, so I didn't really worry about it.

It's only now, long after the donuts are made and cooled, that I thought about cleaning up, and thought of clearing the table for lunch. One of the things on the table is a carton of eggs...that I pulled out for the donuts...and never even opened. I somehow missed that step, and then because I had to add an indefinite amount of flour, I didn't notice that something was missing. So now I have fifty plus donuts in my kitchen without any eggs in them, that I can't give away, now that I know they're deficient. Being cheap, I can't throw them away (and they're not bad; just not amazing).

Avram offered to bring me home an old fashioned donut from Krispy Kreme, so that I could get the proper flavor, at least, but then that would make me a complete doofus, not just mostly one, so I declined (at least until the current donuts are long gone).

Sometimes you would never know I've been cooking for over 16 years.

9 comments:

  1. My heart cries for your eggless donuts. If I could, I'd mail you one. (I mean, technically I could, but eww) Now I'm inspired to make some, you should send me the recipe :)

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  2. Oh Thora. I've so been there, I left the flour out of my Puffed Apple pancakes (it's like a batter that you pour over the sliced pancakes, and there's only a few tablespoons of flour in it) on a day that we had house guests. It was only Todd's brother and his wife, but I was so embarrassed. My Pancakes had no Puff. It was just sweet, cinnamon flavored scrambled eggs with apples. SO yucky.

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  3. umm now I'm craving OFD! I still love that you made them and will eat them - that's what I would do. You're awesome Thor.

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  4. So, okay, I'm a doufus. What does OFD stand for? I've had doughnuts once for home evening here but they didn't taste quite right either. What makes cake flour cake flour?

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  5. OFD-old fashioned donut; it was my own unofficial abbreviation because I'm a lazy typer. Cake flour is made from a different blend of wheat; it's a soft wheat instead of a hard one, so it makes more tender cakes. I was talking about cake donuts, though, which are different from the raised yeast donut kind. For one thing they're a lot quicker; they're raised with baking powder or baking soda, or a combination of the two.

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  6. i am laughing at your story, but i know if i did the same thing right now in my pregnant state i would probably cry! I hope that you try to make them again, with the eggs! in fact take all the ingredient out of the packages and put them into little bowls that way you can just dump in turn and it will be harder to miss something!! And you can pretend you are a chef on tv and narate it all to lydia which will make her smile i am sure. I used to love when you played the narate the food game as children.

    I also love donuts. And krispy kream donuts are to die for!! when i was going to utah state is when they opened the first one in utah, down in provo. Everyone was all talking about it and for some reason a bunch of us from the dorms who were bored on a friday night decided to drive down to get some!! So we drove all the way from Logan to Provo. I must say i was surprised they all wanted to, but see i had never had a krispy kream donut. When we got there they had some hot fresh ones you could taste for free!! YUM!! I bought a whole dozen and spoiled myself the whole next week.

    dang it now i am craving one!!! Hmmmmm will have to go this weekend for sure!

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  7. You should totally offer the recipe, Thora. They sound tasty, even sans eggs.

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  8. Here's the recipe:

    1 cup sugar
    2 eggs (remember this part)
    1 cup sour cream
    1 cup buttermilk
    1 teaspoon baking soda
    cinnamon & nutmeg to taste (I used 1 tsp. cinnamon and 1/2 tsp nutmeg)

    Mix above ingredients with flour until it forms a soft dough. Roll out on a counter with lots of flour, cut into shapes, and fry at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. (Or until a small piece of dough dropped in the oil rises to the top and the oil around it bubbles).

    With it I made this glaze:

    1/3 c. butter
    2 cups powdered sugar
    1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
    4-6 Tbs. hot water

    Melt butter, add vanilla and sugar until smooth (mine made a thick paste). Add hot water until desired consistency (I used all 6 Tbs. of water).

    It's kind of a vague recipe, because it's from 1887 (as in it was only a list of ingredients and nothing else), so follow preferred method of making into donuts. The dough toughens the more it's handles, so try and get as many donuts from the first rolling of the dough as possible. The recipe doesn't make enough glaze to cover all the donuts; the remaining I covered with powdered sugar.

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  9. Funny, I was reading along and you mentioned the batter being too white, and I thought "Maybe she didn't add enough eggs" and then I got to the part where you didn't add any eggs. It made me feel very homemaker.

    You seem like a spudnut kind of person. Maybe you should try them next.

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