Cooking Lesson #738: Baked Vanilla Glazed Chocolate Doughnuts

…from the Perspectives’ Kitchen

ow you doin’? Buckle your seatbelt, this is going to be a long one. Anybody that knows me, knows my love for doughnuts.
 
It all started when I would collect on my paper route. There was a Winchell’s Doughnuts on Pico and La Cienega Boulevards in Los Angeles. That’s where I first met Vern Winchell who treated me to a box of a baker’s dozen. I think the intention was for me to take them home and I’m ashamed to say they never got there—I ate them all while pedaling my bike back home.
 
The fact is I just love good doughnuts—there really is no such thing as bad doughnuts… some are just better than others.
 
A few years back, Joan found donut pans on Amazon and gifted them to me. Since we both love doughnuts, we had a couple of sets delivered to the test kitchen. We set out to make all types of doughnuts and over the years, we have made some really good ones—all kinds of both plain and exotic flavors.
 
I bake a batch of bran muffins weekly but realized I hadn’t made donuts for some time. I decided to make vanilla frosted cake doughnuts since they’re Joan’s favorite. I had them ready for the oven in no time and once baked, the donuts were incredibly moist and glazed to perfection. I only baked off half of the batter and had enough batter left to bake off the next morning. See the recipe toward the end of this post.
 
But where did all these delicious pastries come from and why do some people consider them the best breakfast treat available? Well, here is the rest of the story I found in Eater Magazine authored by Claudia Geib.
 
As she explained it, even during the worst of war, the ring-shaped confections offered a bite of joy and a much-needed morale boost to weary soldiers during World War I. Dough fried in oil is a delicacy found worldwide… in Italy it’s zeppole, from Greek loukoumades to Moroccan sfenj to jalebi in India and Pakistan. But in North America at the start of the 1900s, fried dough balls were a regional specialty mostly confined to New England, New York and a few places in the Midwest.
 
Just 50 years later, doughnuts would be Americans’ treat of choice—ubiquitous in break rooms, beloved of cops and, more recently, made fancy by hipsters. But few people know that the doughnut might never have made it big without a world war or two.
 
In a new episode of Gastropod, “Raised and Glazed,” co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley explore the evolution of the doughnut… where the name comes from, how it got a hole and how it became ubiquitous across the United States thanks to the efforts of a few female volunteers working on the front lines of global conflict.
 
When the United States joined World War I, the Salvation Army sent women to the front in France with a few simple instructions: Lead the men in prayers; play music; comfort the wounded and the dying; and, most importantly, do whatever they could to keep up morale. Conditions on the Western Front were grim. As Salvation Army leader Evangeline Booth recalled in her memoirs of the war, the rain had combined with heavy bombing to turn the entire landscape into a swamp, and “depression like a great heavy blanket hung over the whole area.”
 
The women made cocoa, fudge, and apple pies to lift men’s spirits. But pies were difficult to make — achieving a flaky crust was tricky in the trenches — and sometime in late September 1917, Salvation Army volunteer Helen Purviance suggested focusing on a simpler treat. She and her colleagues could combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, eggs, and milk to make doughnut dough. Then they could fry their creations in a steel soldier’s helmet filled with boiling lard.

The front cover of the songbook for “My Doughnut Girl” displays a girl who appears to be in her mid-teens carrying the doughnuts that rose to fame during the war effort were originally made with one goal in mind: Maintaining morale.
 
New York: The Salvation Army National Headquarters, [1919] /Library of Congress, Music Division.
 
The women rolled the doughnuts out with a grape juice bottle, cut them out with a baking powder can, and poked a hole in the middle using a funnel. Dusted with powdered sugar and handed out hot by the thousands, the treats produced by the “doughnut Sallies,” as the women soon became known, instantly became a hit among the men. Even for men who hadn’t come from a doughnut-loving region of the States, the fried rings came to symbolize everything good and comforting. “Newspapers would describe the soldiers looking through the hole in the donut and seeing their mother on the other side,” Michael Krondl, author of The Donut, told Gastropod. “It was a beautiful thing.”
 
Though the Salvation Army only sent 250 volunteers to the front, these women had a disproportionate impact on the soldier’s psyche; the treats “put pep in every doughboy,” Salvation Army Colonel William Barker told a reporter from the Boston Daily Globe. “Every doughboy felt his mother was somewhere just back of the lines in the midnight mists and damps, frying doughnuts for him just as she used to do.” (Incidentally, the “doughboy” moniker originated from the Mexican-American War, and it had nothing to do with doughnut consumption at all.)
 
It got to the point that military command would pull strings to ensure that donut-making supplies made it through, despite the fact that the French were surviving on black bread.
 
“The American soldiers take their hats off to the Salvation Army,” wrote a New York Times correspondent in 1918, “and when the memoirs of this war come to be written the doughnuts and apple pies of the Salvation Army are going to take their place in history.”
 
Even men who didn’t come from doughnut-loving regions of the United States were willing to sing the praises of doughnut girls and their creations. Popular culture brought this newfound love of doughnuts back home. Songs like “My Doughnut Girl” and films like Fires of Faith, which featured scenes of a Salvation Army Sally distributing doughnuts to bedridden men, helped cement the doughnut’s new status as an American icon. Doughnut entrepreneurs popped up, ready to supply a nation suddenly hungry for the treats feeding the troops, and companies advertised mixes that allowed the home baker to make doughnuts themselves.
 
When fighting ended, the Salvation Army continued to sell doughnuts to raise money through the 1920s and the Great Depression; and when war broke out again in Europe, volunteers from both the Salvation Army and the Red Cross once again brought doughnuts to the front. They were assisted by a newfangled invention: an automatic doughnut-making machine, which allowed doughnuts to be made faster and in greater quantities than ever before.
 
Post-war, doughnuts continued their spread across the country, fitting perfectly with the newly industrialized landscape, the rise of the automobile, and the growth of women in the workforce. For a whole new class of car-based commuters, a doughnut shop became the perfect place to stop for coffee and a sweet circular cake for breakfast.
 
If you like donuts as much as I do, try my recipe out. If you don’t have a donut pan, I highly recommend getting one, but you can also pipe the batter into circles on a sheet pan as a less-expensive substitute.
 
Ingredients 
For the doughnuts
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 large egg
6 tablespoons sour cream
1/4 cup whole milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
 
For the vanilla glaze
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
6 tablespoons whole milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
 
Directions
To make the doughnuts

1. Preheat an oven to 375⁰ F and spray a donut pan with food release.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar, cocoa powder and baking soda.
3. In a separate small bowl, combine the egg, sour cream, milk, and vegetable oil.
4. Stir the wet mixture into the dry mixture until just combined. Do not over mix.
5. Spoon the batter evenly into the donut pan.
6. Place the donut pan into the preheated oven and bake for 8-9 minutes.
7. Remove the pan from oven and allow donuts to cool.

 
To make the glaze

1. While the donuts are cooling, prepare glaze by heating the powdered sugar, milk and vanilla over low heat in a saucepan.
2. Remove from heat and dip each donut into the glaze entirely, or just drizzle it over the donuts depending on your personal preference.
3. Serve warm with strong coffee.

ChefSecret: If you find yourself in the Las Vegas area the best and most creative doughnuts can be found at Pink Box. Be creative as they are and decorate your doughnuts with all kinds of goodies.

Quip of the Day:  Knock Knock. Who’s there? Donut. Donut who? Donut ask, it’s a secret!
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