What's Cookin?

This weekend I thought I'd do some baking. My youngest has shown an increasing interest in cooking and baking so I suggested we make cinnamon rolls. She promptly replied that she would like to make donuts. My taste buds were set on cinnamon rolls but donuts are good too. I was feeling accommodating so I started looking up recipes for donuts. She wanted to make krispy kreme style donuts - which means yeast dough with lots of rising time. When I explained how long that would take she quickly agreed that cake donuts would be just fine. Now the thing is, I rarely deep fat fry anything. We're talking once a year, twice max. Since I so rarely fry anything I don't have any kind of deep fat fryer. I've thought about getting one - just for this sort of occasion, but I don't want to encourage myself to fry that much food. So, we pulled out a large, deep pan and melted about 2 inches of shortening in it. We mixed our dough, cut our donuts and began cooking them.
This is where a deep fat fryer would be handy. See, you need a good hot temperature - my recipe called for 375. If your fat isn't hot enough your donuts will absorb more of it. I have a candy thermometer but it didn't fit onto my pan quite right so I just held it in there now and then.

We dropped in our donuts, three at a time (didn't want the fat temp to drop too much) and watched them puff up and turn to gold. Which they did rather nicely, as you can see. In a couple minutes they were ready to come out. After they drained on paper towels we dipped them in plain glaze, chocolate glaze, cinnamon-sugar and plain sugar. Hmmm, we didn't do any powdered sugar...
And here's our finished product: a nice variety of fresh, tasty home-made donuts! It occurred to me afterward that we could have bought canned biscuit dough and made donuts from that. Now that would have been even quicker and simpler. Ah, what the heck - part of this whole process was a cooking lesson for my daughter. She can learn the short cuts later...