This easy sugar donut recipe comes from my grandmother and makes traditional baking powder donuts, so no yeast required to make these! You can coat these with cinnamon sugar to make sugar donuts, or a maple glaze to make maple glazed donuts. Up to you!
My grandmother spelled these as “doughnuts” on her recipe card, but I think most of us would nowadays probably spell them as “donuts.” As you can tell from the photo, my grandmother wrote up this recipe years ago on a recipe card, like most of her other recipes. My mom estimates that the recipe is almost 100 years old. Almost all her recipe cards are contained in her metal recipe box that my mom has kept pretty much intact, perhaps with a few additions.
My mom has never made these doughnuts, and sadly, my grandmother is not here to coach me through my attempts to make her donuts. Her recipe card only has ingredients and amounts; no instructions or order of addition of the ingredients as you can see in the photo. I use the order of ingredients to know what order to combine the ingredients and what mixing method to use. Since all the wet ingredients are listed first, then all the dry, we can assume this uses the two bowl mixing method, also known as the muffin mixing method.
When you first mix the dough, it may seem like it’s too sticky to do anything with. But once you’ve chilled the dough for 1 hour, the dough rolls out nicely on a floured surface.
- use a donut cutter
- use two round cookie cutters of different sizes.
Maintaining the temperature of the oil can be difficult on a stovetop. That’s for sure. To avoid that the oil get too hot, I alternated between having the saucepan on the burner and off the burner. I found this worked better than lower the stove setting, which I set to 4 once the oil was heated to the right temperature.
By the way, a great trick for flipping donuts: use chopsticks!
I’ve updated the recipe to use butter instead of shortening. I don’t usually have shortening in my pantry, but feel free to use whatever fat you prefer.
Sugar donuts
Equipment
Ingredients
- 1 large egg
- 100 grams (½ cup) granulated sugar
- 2.5 mL (½ tsp) pure vanilla extract
- 22 grams (1½ tbsp) unsalted butter melted and cooled
- 125 mL (½ cup) milk (2 % fat)
- 220 grams (1¾ cups) all-purpose flour
- 0.625 mL (⅛ tsp) ground cloves
- 10 mL (2 tsp) baking powder
- 1 L (4 cups) canola oil for deep frying
- 200 grams (1 cup) cinnamon sugar
Maple glaze (optional)
- 125 grams (1 cup) icing sugar
- 60 mL (¼ cup) maple syrup
- milk (2 % fat) as much as needed for diluting the glaze
Instructions
- Whisk together the egg, sugar, vanilla, butter, and milk in a bowl. Set aside.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and ground cloves.
- Combine the wet and the dry ingredients and stir to form a sticky dough.
- Cover the bowl tightly and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour.
- Roll out the dough to ½–¾ inches and cut out donuts with round cutters (use 1 big and 1 small cutter to make traditional ring donuts).
- Heat a deep sauté pan (like this pan from Le Creuset) half-filled with oil to 350 ºF. Prepare a sheet pan with a wire rack set over it. Line with a little paper towel.
- Fry the donuts, 3 or 4 at a time until golden brown, then flip and continue frying until the colour is fairly even.
- Transfer the fried donuts to the prepared rack and let them cool slightly before tossing in cinnamon sugar to coat. Note that if you want to glaze the donuts, you would skip the sugar coating.
Maple glaze (optional)
- Whisk together the icing sugar, maple syrup, and a splash of milk to form a thick glaze.
- Dip the donuts on one size and twist to coat the surface. Then flip over and place back on the wire rack so that the glaze sets. Repeat with the other donuts.
Notes
Nutrition
Janice Lawandi is chemist-turned-baker, working as a recipe developer in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She studied pastry at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa and cooking at l’Académie Culinaire. She has a BSc in Biochemistry from Concordia University and a PhD in Chemistry from McGill University. Visit janicelawandi.com to see my portfolio.
Old recipes are such a pain sometimes! They’re usually so vague in their descriptions, probably because the writer knew what they were doing. 🙂 Very frustrating!
Anyway, I think that your doughnuts look beautiful! Great job.
Great job! I too have a donut recipe from my grandfather, who was a baker, but haven’t got it quite right yet:) These look yummy though, I would eat a whole box:) I enjoyed this month’s challenge, and ended up with halloween donuts. Fun:)
Great job on the challenge! Oh I have the same trouble with my grandmother’s recipes. Sometimes she’ll add a bit of this, a bit of that and has her own way of doing things. Your doughnuts turned out wonderful and look soooo tasty! I love the sprinkled powdered sugar and the glaze. YUM! I had lots of fun with this challenge, it was my first challenge and I LOVE doughnuts so I was super excited. I made Peanut Butter and Jelly Filled Doughnuts. 🙂
Yum! the disection shot looks so cakey.
great job on this months challenge! your donuts look lovely!
Great job! You are a doughnut making fool! LOL Two kinds – wow!
Not sure if I said this before…but hey you are form Montreal like me….cool!
I love the first one, your grandma’s recipe. That is so cool
I love looking at old recipes, my Mum would be 89 if she were alive and my grandmother 110! I have their recipes. Many of my Mum’s recipe have only ingredients – they just knew what to do – I suppose less choice of ingredients and gadgets. Your doughnuts look delicious . Tres bon – from New Zealand.
Given the age of the recipe, there is a good chance that “shortening” does not mean “vegetable shortening” like it does today (note that vegetable shortening is only about 100 years old). Shortening used to refer to any solid-at-room-temperature fat, including lard, beef tallow, or even butter.