Oven Donuts - from Natalie King

This recipe was originally written by Ruth Heiges.

Ingredients
1 pckg dry yeast (1 scant tablespoon of fresh yeast).
1/8 cup warm water
¾ cups milk (scalded and cooled)
¼ cup sugar
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
1 egg
1/6 cup shortening/butter/oil
2 ¼ cups flour
Cinnamon + sugar, or sugar glaze for topping

Method
In a large mixer bowl, stand yeast for a few minutes with one tsp sugar and a little warm water until it froths. Add the rest of water, milk, rest of sugar, salt, spice(s), egg, shortening/butter and half the flour. Blend half a minute at medium speed, scraping the bowl occasionally. Stir in the remaining flour until smooth, again scraping the sides of the bowl. Cover. Let rise in a warm place until double (50-60 minutes). Turn dough onto well-floured cloth-covered board; roll around *lightly* to coat with flour. Dough will be soft to handle. With a floured rolling-pin, gently roll dough about ½ an inch thick. Lift doughnuts carefully with a spatula and place 2 inches apart on a greased cookie sheet. Brush doughnuts with melted butter. Cover; let rise until double again (about 20 minutes)

Heat oven to 420 degrees f (215 degrees C, or a reasonably hot oven). Bake 8-10 minutes or until golden. Immediately brush with melted butter and shake in the sugar/cinnamon mix or spread with glaze. Makes about a dozen doughnuts.

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A few of my own tips. Firstly, when I made these I didn't use a doughnut cutter, but rolled them gently into shape. From memory, I think I've also tried using two sizes of cookie cutters (a big one and a small one), and don't remember any terrible mishaps. Really the shapes are pretty irrelevant, as long as they're roughly of a similar size to that mentioned so that they can cook though and you don't squish all the air out of the dough in the process of making the shapes. I guess if you have kids you could experiment with doing letters or similar.

I make these with butter/butter substitute rather than oil and suspect that this is the tastiest option. We use Olivio/Oliviani for such things (I'm not sure if you're in NZ, but if not, they're like margarine made from olive oil) and it works fine. I've never tried shortening to my knowledge, and don't intend to start soon.

I have no idea what a package of yeast is, but it was in the original recipe. The fresh yeast measurement comes from my Mum.

This is actually half the original recipe, but I've found it to be plenty. They really are best hot from the oven, so you don't want too many - it's not worth saving any for the next day. That being said, if you've got a group of people then they're generally popular enough to not hang around.

As with most things, they can be improved by the winning combination of sugar, spice and fat. That is, once they've mostly cooked, brush them with melted butter, and the more sugar/spice mixture the yummier, IMHO. This can be made to taste.

The biggest thing to watch out for is to be careful not to burn the bottoms. They've got a really short cooking time, so it's worth keeping an eye out for this and not going away to do other stuff.

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That's pretty much it - hope you enjoy them!