Anjali's Food Kaleidoscope

Doughnuts

For those of you who thought that doughnuts were impossible to bake , here is the simplest ever never go wrong recipe where in you dont have to knead and knead the dough and then wait for it to rise and then knead again and bake for a long time.

 A hot favourite with all the children I have known, its incredibly simple to make. It wont take you more than thirty minutes to make thirty or more of these deep fried doughnuts.
I have used a doughnut cutter here, incase you do not have one but really want to make these, no sweat, take a sharp edged round  small steel glass and another smaller one , maybe the cap of the vanilla essence bottle or something like that to cut the inner circle. Now that you are armed to the teeth with all the simplest ingredients which I am sure are there in your kitchen right now, go ahead and surprise yourself that you also can make these goodies in half an hour. 

Ingredients:
In Indian measuring cups

1.           2  to 2½ cups flour

2.           1 cup castor sugar

3.           1 egg

4.           5 tablespoons refined oil

5.           5 tablespoons milk

6.           1 teaspoon vanilla essence

7.            1 ½ teaspoon baking powder

8.            ½ teaspoon soda

Method:

1.             Sift the flour with the soda and the baking powder.

2.              Mix the egg , sugar, oil , milk and vanilla essence with a whisk. you dont have to use an egg beater here as the whole idea is to just blend all the ingredients well. Just a few whips with a hand whisk will do the needful.

3.               Mix the dry and wet ingredients and  gently knead to form a dough. The reason why I insist on gently kneading is that you do not have to knead it like the regular dough for the rotis or bread, the whole idea is to just put the things together . If you find the dough too sticky then add a little more flour and if its too dry then just a tablespoon more of milk should make it into a nice soft and pliable dough. Thats another reason why I have written two to two and a half cups flour, use two cups at first and slowly keep adding more flour. Sometimes I have had to use about three cups of flour.

4.             Roll out  into 5mm thickness onto a dry surface sprinkled with flour  and cut with a doughnut cutter into doughnuts . Whenever the dough starts to stick either on the tabletop or your rolling pin, just sprinkle a little flour each time.

5.             Deep fry on medium flame till golden brown.