Week 14: Not So Sexy Doughnuts & A Bittersweet Event
- Dec 1, 2017
- 5 min read
Day 1: Our final prep day had arrived for our Sweet Endings event & I could not have been more excited to get everything done! We checked in for class, listened to Chef’s instructions and began gathering the equipment and ingredients we needed to prepare. My team decided to split up for the tasks we needed to finish so – Jordan D. & I were assigned to making the dough while Jordyn R. & Jennie were assigned to making the glazes for our donuts!
Jordan and I gathered our ingredients needed to make the doughnut dough such as AP flour, instant yeast, sugar, salt, whole milk, eggs, unsalted butter & the oil needed to fry the doughnuts was only needed on event day. The directions were as follows:
In a medium bowl whisk 3 cups of flour, 2 ¼ tbsp. yeast, 6 tablespoons of sugar and 1 tsp of salt
Set bowl aside
In mixer bowl, place milk and eggs. Put mixer on low speed of 3 to 4 and slowly add flour mixture until dough balls form
Add softened butter one piece at a time waiting 15 seconds after each addition
Continue mixing for 3 minutes longer, adding remaining flour 1 tbsp. at a time until forms a soft ball
Place dough in lightly oiled medium bowl and cover in plastic wrap until dough is risen double in size
Put dough on floured surface and roll out to ½ inch of thickness.
Cut the dough using a 2 ½ to 3-inch cutter
Put holes on floured baking sheet and cover in plastic wrap for 30 to 45 minutes at room temperature until slightly puffy
On event day, add shortening to a pot and heat until 375 degrees. Place 4 to 5 holes in at a time and fry until golden brown (45 to 60 seconds per side). Remove doughnuts from hot oil and drain on a paper towel lined rimmed baking sheet. Cool for 10 minutes.
But rather instead of letting the dough rise we were supposed to place the shaped dough onto a baking sheet wrapped with saran plastic and then place it in the freezer – needing to move it into the freezer the day after our prep day.
Following the instructions was rather simple although we had a couple of hiccups. First our dough was rather sticky and needed about a cup of extra flour thrown into the mix in order to ensure it reached the consistency it needed to. Once we finally figured out how to make the dough right – we needed to roll & cut into the shapes we wanted for prep day. Our original plan was to make doughnut holes but when we finalized the shape for them Chef said that they might not look as sexy as we would want them to. Quickly, we flattened out the dough balls and cut them so they looked like mini versions of doughnuts. While it wasn’t our original plan I was confident that they would still work.
My AHA moment, I feel like my group could’ve planned out our entire preparation day a lot better than we did. After we realized that we needed to change some original steps in order to ensure everything went smoothly on event day I thought it would have helped to ensure that we were more prepared.
Here is some of the tools we needed to use in order to make everything on our prep day, our dough while we were rolling it out, our homemade raspberry glaze and the totally awesome Keurig that Chef bought for our class to use!
Here is Jordan rolling out our dough for the doughnuts so that the dough was about 1/2 inches thick! Good work Jordan!
Day 2: How bittersweet of a class period this was! It was finally our last event day and the pressure to do a really great job was on! When we first arrived in class, we immediately placed our doughnuts into the proving oven so that they were able to rise a little bit before we fried them. As we waited on the doughnuts we began to decorate our station for our NAUPD Christmas party! We had Christmas everything and went all out to ensure that our presentation looked magical.
About 15-20 minutes flew by and our doughnuts were ready to be fried. Chef offered us a demonstration on how to fry the doughnuts in the oil which helped us feel more comfortable making them. We placed about 5-6 doughnuts in the pot at a time only allowing about 45 seconds per each side and then we took them out and placed them on a wire rack. This took about half an hour to finish and then we were ready to glaze them. While the chocolate and vanilla glaze worked perfectly with our doughnuts – our homemade raspberry glaze did not turn out the way we wanted it to. While we were able to make it work, it felt very rushed and they did not look the way we thought they would.
But finally, our event was getting ready to begin! We took some group pictures to capture this bittersweet day and were ready for guests to walk through the door. Our first 2 guests came up to the table excited to get a taste of our mini version of our vanilla-glazed, chocolate with candy-cane glaze and our improvised raspberry and chocolate swirl glaze doughnuts along with a hot cup of coffee with some sweet vanilla creamer. Each guest enjoyed the overall taste of the doughnut and the coffee together and thought our them was unique to our dish.
Chef even thought that our doughnuts had the correct texture of a cake doughnut which made us incredibly happy to know that he thought our dish was made the right way. We had a couple of improvements we could have made but overall the event couldn’t have had a better ending to it than it did.
My AHA moment, when Chef tried out doughnuts he mentioned how he enjoyed the texture and thought it was very intentional to have 3 different flavors for the guests to try. But he also mentioned some improvements that we could have made to make the doughnuts better and tastier than they were.
Here are the doughnuts in the oil while they fried, Jennie messing around with how small & cute the doughnuts turned out, the finished products of all the doughnuts we made, our finished layout of our table, Jennie and I showing off our homemade NAUPD shirts, our adorable police car box, our sweet shoutout to NAUPD and a lovely group photo with the infamous Chef himself!
Here is Chef's demonstration to Jennie & I of how to fry the doughnuts for our event. The process was fairly simple & easy to do!
Integration From Another Class into This One or My Future Career
In my ACC 255 class we have been assigned a numerous amount of homework assignments the past couple of weeks and I normally would be incredibly stressed about getting them all finished. But as the semester has gone on I've made sure to understand the material in its entirety so I am able to complete each assignment properly & that has helped me feel more determined and confident to finish all the assignments I need to. I feel as if I took that helpful tip from my ACC class into my future career I'll always be motivated to understand a certain task I receive and end up loving knowing how to do the task I need to complete.
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