Chocolate Cake & Red Velvet Cake Donut Holes

Since our recent visit to the Donut Hole in Florida, I have been craving donuts a bit. When the time came for us to bring snacks to Sunday School, I thought why not try and make homemade donuts! I found this recipe on Smitten Kitchen and got straight to work. The dough was easy enough to make, but the frying of the donuts was where it got a little tricky for me. See this was my first time deep frying anything and it was just tough to know when they were done because of the dark chocolatey color. Then my oil burned toward the end of the batch so that made for a wonderful aroma in our house! Haha!

Even so, these donuts actually turned out really good. They had a wonderful chocolate cakey flavor and I would definitely try them again. I do think I need a little practice with my donut frying so that they cook consistently all the way through, but I'm so glad they turned out! I had the muffin mix waiting on back up just in case, but thankfully I didn't need it. I opted to spoon these out instead of rolling & cutting them so they turned out a bit rustic looking to say the least:) Taste is what matters most, right!

I also made red velvet donuts, which I ended up baking in a mini muffin pan since the oil burned. I just took the chocolate cake donut recipe and tweaked it a bit, surprisingly they turned out really good & everyone at Sunday School really loved them and went back for seconds! I think it could be tweaked a little bit more, but I am going to go ahead and post what I did so you all can try it for yourselves. I topped them with the buttercream recipe found here.

Recipe for Chocolate Cake Donuts & icing can be found here.

Red Velvet Cake Donuts

Source: Adapted from Smitten Kitchen who got it from Use Real Butter
Yield: 48 donut holes

Ingredients:
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
5 tbsp. unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled a bit
1 tsp. white vinegar

Directions:
In large bowl sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder & salt. In a separate bowl beat together eggs, sugar, buttermilk, butter & vinegar until well blended. Slowly add wet ingredients into dry ingredients and stir until a batter is formed. Chill for approximately one hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a mini muffin pan with cooking spray. Drop dough by spoonful, and fill each muffin cup 2/3 full. Bake for 12-15 minutes until tops spring back. Cool in pan on cooling rack for approximately 10 minutes and then loosen around the edges with a knife & pop out of muffin pan.

Dip donut hole into icing and allow excess to drip off. Place on cooling rack to dry. Once completely cooled top with buttercream. Store in sealed container in a cool dry place.