Baked Banana Bread Doughnuts… For Breakfast!

Friday is here…. weekend is upon us!  Thanks for all the nice comments, emails and tweets about my new adventure.  So far so good and it is FUN.  This morning I woke up a little extra early, 5:00am to do some baking for Mrs. Cooking as she was tasked to provide breakfast for her staff today.  I didn’t mind getting up and I had a solid plan in place to execute and had 2.5 hours to complete.

On the Menu

• 2 Dozen Banana Bread Doughnuts( minus two for quality assurance testing )
• 2 Dozen  Sugar Topped Blueberry Nutmeg muffins
• 2 Sour Dough Loaves Cinnamon Pull Apart Bread ( I know… sounds kinda crazy but it looked good.  No testing done on this one – will have to wait on word from the crew)

Today, We will focus on donuts.  Baked doughnuts to be specific.  Not too often you run into a baked doughnut but I was surfing the internet the other day for some breakfast ideas and I stumbled across Laurie’s recipe from Simply Scratch for Banana Walnut Breakfast Doughnuts.  I took a quick read thru and looked at her pictures and I thought…. what the heck.  Let’s give it a try.

Not sure mine came out as pretty as Laurie’s but I did buy a fancy new doughnut pan yesterday to get the full effect.  I opted to leave out the walnuts as Mrs. Cooking is not a huge fan and I used frozen bananas so it was tricky to keep the bananas chunky. Here is the lowdown below

Ingredients

• Butter for greasing pan{s}
• 1-1/2 Cups All Purpose Flour
• 3/4 Cup Light Brown Sugar, packed
• 1/2 Tsp. Baking Soda
• 1/2 Tsp. Kosher Salt
• 1/4 Tsp. Baking Powder
• 1/4 Tsp. Cinnamon
• 1/4 Tsp. Nutmeg, freshly grated
• 2 ripe Bananas
• 1 whole Egg
• 1/2 Cup Unsweetened Applesauce
• 1/2 Tbsp. Real Vanilla Extract

Glaze

• 3 oz. Cream Cheese, softened
• 3 Tbsp. Powdered Sugar
• 2 Tbsp. Whole Milk
• 1/4 Tsp. Real Vanilla Extract

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees, and grease your doughnut pan with butter.
2. In a large bowl; add the light brown sugar and sift in the flour, baking soda and powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg, set aside.
3. In a medium bowl, roughly mash up the two bananas leaving them pretty chunky. Add in the applesauce, egg and vanilla. Stir until all the ingredients are incorporated.
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until combined.
5. Spoon batter into prepared doughnut pan and fill up 3/4 of the way.

6. Bake in a preheated 325 degree oven for 17-20 minutes or until the edges start to pull away from the pan and the doughnuts bounce back when gently pressed. {I’d stick closer to the 17 minute mark.}
7. While the doughnuts cool, combine the cream cheese, powdered sugar and vanilla, stir. Pour in whole milk while whisking until desired consistency.
8. Dunk doughnuts into glaze and set on a wire rack.
9. ENJOY!

Zesty Tip:  I think I would make one alteration the next time.  I think I would substitute the apple sauce for butter.  I would melt the butter in with the wet ingredients in hopes that would break down the gluten in the flour to create a lighter airy doughnut.

Alright fellas, I better clean up the kitchen here.  it looks like it got hit with a small hurricane.  Have a great weekend and I will talk to you on Monday.

Take care

zesty

 

Tagged as: banana bread donuts