The Road to Delicious Perfection–Apple Cider Donuts with Maple Frosting

I love fall flavors. I’d put pumpkin pie spice in just about everything if I could. Mmmm. LadyBug has been asking to bake with me (we’ve been watching Master Chef Kids!) and since she’s just back to health after a pretty scary illness, I figured the time was right. I decided to make these Apple Cider Donuts from Monday Morning Donuts. This recipe includes a salted caramel glaze that looked divine. And a pain. A divine pain.

In any case, LadyBug and I followed the recipe and had fun baking together. I am thankful to my mother-in-law for teaching my kids how to crack an egg. I don’t know how she did it, and Bug isn’t all that good at it (it’s a motor planning issue for him), but LadyBug is pretty good for a six-year-old. We followed it closely, but did add a little bit of pumpkin pie spice that wasn’t called for. I mean, why not? Once the batter was made, I sent her off to play while I filled the donut pans and popped them into the oven. The problem is that Misha (the recipe author) didn’t say how much to fill the pans. To be fair, her entire blog is about donuts and she probably gives that information on another post. Since I was using King Arthur Flour’s Apple Cider Donuts with Maple Glaze recipe for the frosting, I sort of just followed their guide for filling the pan.

It was not a good choice.

This is a trifecta of issues, really. First, you can see that the pan was overfilled. They looked like muffins instead of donuts and, of course, they took a lot longer to cook. The second problem is that I felt like I had oversprayed the pan, so I wiped down the molds a bit. They were still greased, but obviously not enough. They didn’t want to come out, but also… The last problem was that King Arthur said to let their donuts cool for 5 minutes. It was not enough for this type of donut and they fell apart when I tried to get them out of the pan. Second batch, I adjusted the amount of batter and let them cool a lot more before trying to get them out of the pan. Success!

They were delicious without a single thing on them. In fact, the donut scraps above were good, too. A donut is a donut.

As I mentioned above, I frosted them with the maple glaze from King Arthur Flour’s recipe. I didn’t dip them in sugar because 1) I let them cool too much, and 2) they are already very sweet with the donut and the glaze. I also ended up adding a lot more maple syrup and cream than the recipe called for because the “glaze” was a very thick frosting. No biggie there, but just an FYI.

The final product: