Doughnuts: 90 Simple and Delicious Recipes to Make at Home by Lara Ferroni
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Doughnuts” is a great resource for those of you who want to dabble in making your own delicious breakfast pastries. Lara Ferroni breaks the process down in a very user friendly manner with a lot of make-it-at-home ingredients.
Ms. Ferroni starts the book with the basics, the doughs. Included are recipes for raised, cake, and some international varieties. The raised and cake varieties also include gluten-free, vegan, fried, and baked options. I’m not into deep-frying so I appreciated the inclusion of the baked varieties as well as the option for baking one of the original fried options.
After the doughs we get a smattering of glazes beginning with your basic sugar glaze to brown butter all the way to making your own candy or chocolate sprinkles at home. It never occurred to me that there were so many options for toppings but who’s going to complaining about having so many to choose from?
Finally we get to the good part-flavors. Many of these flavors are ones we’ve had in other pastries but I had not seen in doughnuts until now. There’s carrot cake, German chocolate, margarita, s’mores, etc. For the filled doughnuts like the Boston or the Bavarian she includes homemade recipes for making the fillings. There’s enough flavors to try that it would be awhile before you would be repeating.
With the way the book is organized, there’s a mix-and-match feel to many of the recipes which allows readers to adapt the doughnuts to their tastes. As someone who is trying to make unhealthy things as healthy as possible, the homemade directions for almost all of the fillings down to the milks and sauces stood out to me. This is a must read if you like to bake, like doughnuts, or just have a sweet tooth in general.