It’s fall, what else can we make with pumpkin? That was a humorous rhetorical question 😉
Well of course, we make doughnuts! I have rarely made doughnuts, in fact I just bought my first set of doughnut pans a little while ago. So I jump on the internet to see what others were doing. I scoured and researched recipes for vegan and traditional baked pumpkin doughnuts alike, until it felt like my eyes were gonna pop out…little drama for effect 🙂 I found a couple you may like. One is vegan, one is not. I will give you my honest opinion and any suggestions I would make regarding the recipes as we go.
For the recipes below I used pumpkin I cooked and pureed (so much better than canned store bought!) And you don’t have to, but please try this recipe and make your own Pumpkin Pie Spice.
Traditional Doughnut Recipe
The recipe I found for these traditional doughnuts are found at the Food Network.
I followed the directions to a T, The only thing I would change in the recipe is to whip the oil, butter and sugar together, before adding the eggs, pumpkin and vanilla.
So here’s the thing. Doughnut pans are usually sold in a set of 2 right??? Helloooo, this recipe calls for 3 doughnut pans. 3 won’t even fit in the oven 😀 Ha ha ha. Okay, so my suggestion would be to modify the recipe to make 12 Doughnuts. 3 trays was a bit tricky, even for the equipment I have, let alone the average home.
Vegan Doughnut Recipe
The recipe I found for these are found at My Darling Vegan.
I made a couple of changes to this recipe. I used vanilla in the batter and only used 2 tsp of baking powder because I personally don’t like the flavor baking powder imparts in my food. And I used 2 1/4 tsp of my own recipe for Pumpkin Pie Spice.
This recipe make 6 doughnuts, but this site gives you the option of increasing your batch. Increase it to 12, walla! I liked the consistency of this dough better than the traditional one. It was far easier to work with.
Here are my honest thoughts, tips and tricks. I tried doing what the traditional recipe said and first spooned the dough into the pans. Wasn’t easy and the doughnuts weren’t consistent in size. I had seen where people used piping bags for this. (I had bought some just for this application from Amazon) The piping bag did create a prettier and more consistent doughnut, but the traditional dough was a little messy to work with. (It might get better after you’ve done it a few 100 times 😉 The dough for the vegan recipe was far easier to work with in the piping bag. Both doughnuts have amazing flavor, however the vegan doughnuts did take a little longer to bake and deflated while cooling making them close to a mini doughnut. This isn’t quite a fair comparison though. It’s not like were comparing apples to apples, more like apples to a crab apple. Their the same, but not. If we had made 2 traditional recipes and 2 vegan recipes that might have been a little different. Either way, I will have happy plant based and carnivorous friends!
*Update Both recipes for baked doughnuts should be consumed quickly. The traditional ones fared better than the vegan ones though. I had place both finished and cooled doughnuts in identical airtight containers. They were both a little squishy the next morning, but the vegan ones were more squishy and had reduced in size again. They almost resemble mini doughnuts.
I hope you enjoyed this look at baked pumpkin doughnuts. Please try these recipes and let me know your thoughts.
Chow, and let’s get cooking!
Kristy
Cooking with Kristy 