Baking Jelly Donuts with First Street + Parental Guidance Tix #ChooseSmart #CBias

The holidays are here - whether you are ready or not! For me, the holidays mean getting all my kids into the kitchen and doing a lot of baking. My favorite place to get baking supplies is Smart & Final (but of course you know that since I write about it all the time). Luckily for us, Smart & Final is having an incredible promotion going on right now. Through December 18, 2012, when you purchase two participating First Street baking products you will automatically get a code on your receipt that you can enter online to get a ticket to see the new Bette Midler and Billy Crystal movie, Parental Guidance. My family is planning on seeing this on Christmas Day and I can’t wait. All the information you need to know will be on your receipt and it’s super easy to fill out the online form.

You just fill in your information, along with the special code printed on your receipt and you’ll be sent more information once your code has been validated. Couldn’t be easier.

Now that I got the ticket to Parental Guidance taken care of, it was time to start using the products I purchased.

I was thinking about what recipes might be fun to make this year and along with the traditional latkes, I wanted to make some donuts for Hanukkah. Donuts, especially jelly-filled ones, are a traditional Hanukkah food. I had all my kids home and since they love helping in the kitchen, we got together and poured through our recipe binder. Traditional donuts are either large, fluffy, round pastries or you can make donut holes that are just small, round pastries. Since I didn’t have all the paraphernalia to make them perfectly round, I decided my donuts would get an update and would be more like jelly-stuffed fritters.

All my ingredients gathered, this recipe is so super simple.

Ingredients:
2 cups of all purpose flour
2 tbs sugar
1 1/2 tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1/4 cup melted butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
Oil (you can use vegetable oil or peanut oil)

Mix the dry ingredients together and set aside. Mix the wet ingredients together and whisk well. Blend the wet and dry together until it gets thick and sticky.

 

Once your mixture is ready, heat up your oil. I used a large frying pan with about an inch of oil. Traditionally, a fryer can be used, but not all of us have a huge fryer lying around. Your oil will be hot enough when you place a drop of water in the pan and it sizzles.

When the oil is ready, you can use either a spoon, a cookie scoop or an ice cream scoop to drop balls of dough into the hot oil if you want them to be more traditionally round. I didn’t, so I just used a spoon to get the batter into the pan and then a spatula to turn the donuts so all sides were cooked evenly. It will take about 2 minutes on each side to brown them thoroughly. Once browned evenly, the insides will be soft and fluffy.

You have a ton of options once the donuts are done. You can roll them in granulated sugar, powdered sugar, cinnamon-sugar or do what I did… fill them with jelly. If you have a special tool for filling pastries, then go for it. If not, don’t let that stop you. I took a long, thin knife and dug out a small hole in the donut. Then, I filled a snack bag with strawberry jelly, cut a hole in the corner and squeezed the jelly into the donut.

Think they look good? You should take them. Oh yum!

So they look a little more like fritters than round donut holes… doesn’t matter, they are homemade and they are scrumptious. Pretty sure these aren’t going to last the night.

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I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™ and Smart & Final #CBias #SocialFabric” All opinions are photographs are my own.