Pumpkin & Ginger Doughnuts (NYC)

This recipe sounded simply fantastic, but it was originally on the back burner because it required tinned pumpkin.  While you can get tinned pumpkin in Munich, it's tricky to track down.  Luckily for us, one of my friends had been gifted some canned pumpkin from the US, which she generously shared with us.  

What troubled me about this recipe was the ginger - as I may have mentioned before, I hate root ginger.  I quite like stem ginger (probably because of the sweetness) but this recipe used root and ground ginger so I was a little bit concerned.  

Looking at the actual recipe, there isn't all that much to it.  You  mix the ingredients into a dough, cut them into doughnut shapes, and leave them to rest for about a half hour. We did get a little worried doing this though because the dough was a very odd consistency. It looked very wet and there was too much mixture for the mixer, so it didn't mix very well. We turned out the dough and carried on by hand, adding a lot of extra flour, which probably made them a little heavier than they were meant to be, but they still cooked well. 

The next hurdle we hit was that Soph's (maybe not so) awesome kitchen does not contain any cookie cutters.  So the hunt began for glasses, bowls, ramekins, basically anything we could use to cut one large and one small circle.  Eventually we found a small tumbler and a small bottle lid that worked perfectly. Allegra says to mix in all of the waste to make more doughnuts, but we decided to make doughnuts and doughnut holes so that there was a lot less waste to re-roll.  

The next step was frying the doughnuts.  Allegra did this in a pan with what Soph and I considered to be a large amount of oil. Because of the hazzards associated with this, we opted to put them in the deep fat fryer. This was the fun part.  The book was a little vague when it came to cooking time, so Soph and I had to basically figure it out for ourselves.  The first was a write-off - the first always is - and it was a little over cooked, so we moved to 2 minutes on each side and it worked perfectly. 




When they're cool enough to touch, they get dipped into a ginger glaze made of sugar, ginger and water.   This was a little tough to make for me because it involved grating ginger - meaning that my hands smelled like ginger for far too long for my liking.  I find that the taste is usually not too bad but I can't stand the idea of biting into a piece of ginger, so I was hoping that grating the ginger would make it easier for me to eat at least. 

The dipping stage was actually quite fun.  We had a good system for simultaneously frying and glazing that worked very well.  Our production line meant that it took us about 20 minutes all-in-all to make up all of the doughnuts.  I will say that I got a little inpatient at one point and slightly burnt the tips of my fingers from frequently glazing the doughnuts before they'd fully cooled. I recovered quickly but I would advise anyone who wants to try this recipe to be a little bit more patient than I was. 

Allegra says to eat them as soon as possible but there weren't enough of us to get through all of them so we left some to cool and saved them for another day.  

The doughnuts were scrumptious both hot and cold.  We had our doubts as to whether the dough was right, since we appeared to have many more doughnuts and holes than the recipe book said there should be, but they tasted great.  They were also really fun to make.  Although I was worried about the ginger, my concern was uncalled for because they didn't taste much like ginger at all. This is definitely a recipe we'll repeat - if we can get more pumpkin (although during squash season we can make our own).

I am also pleased to report that we have now tracked down some cookie cutters so next time should be easier.