Pancake-mIx Baked Donuts

My recipe makes 6 baked donuts, using pancake mix, water, and decorative sprinkles. Why only 6? Coz they're quicker to consume so that fewer might get stale. Also, good way to avoid overconsuming in a short time. Besides, I have only one 6-dunut pan and haven't felt inclined to acquire a second pan. Why baked? So you don't need to use a lot of oil and have a lot of it left over. Why pancake mix? For convenience of gathering and measuring fewer ingredients.

Initially, I had spotted an intriguing Parade Magazine recipe for baked donuts. After finding the online version, I googled other baked donut recipes. The Parade recipe started to lose its appeal—requirement of 9 items (too many for my taste), one being a different kind of flour than all-purpose. Turns out that many ingredients are used in pancakes.

I started googling for baked donuts that called for pancake mix. For my recipe, I inferred some processes, using minimal items. My pixstrip shows the following image areas:

1. Implements
2. Ingredients
3. Bowl and mixing utensils used, batter in 6-donut pan
4. Batter with sprinkles
5. Baked donuts
6. Donuts on plate, two cut open

Implements

• Medium mixing bowl
• Wire whip
• Measuring cup for pancake powder
• Measuring cup for water
• Measuring spoons (just in case of needing any)
• Spatula for scraping batter
• 6-donut baking pan, available in crafts stores or online

Ingredients

• 1 C pancake mix powder
• 1 T sugar (Had omitted, but recommend, based on my outcome.)
• 1/2 t vanilla (Had omitted, but recommend, based on my outcome.)
• 2/3 C water
• Sprinkles (nonpareils and jimmies shown)
• Spray oil

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350°.
2. Spray pan with oil, including the donut hole "posts".
3. Stir pancake mix and water together in bowl.
4. Dispense the batter evenly into the pan wells, about 1+ heaping tablespoon each.
5. With finger, clear the batter off the "posts".
   

   Note: Several baked donut recipes say to pour the batter into a zipper bag and pipe into the wells.

6. Sprinkle the decorations you want. (I sprinkled nonpareils in one row and jimmies in the other row.)
7. With finger, clear the sprinkles off the "posts".
   
8. Bake for about 15 minutes. Test for doneness with a toothpick.

Note: If you're leery of raw batter spilling onto the oven, place a larger pan below the donut pan. In my case, the donuts did not spill over.

9. Remove the donuts from the oven and let cool before using two spoons to lift and remove each from pan.

Post-recipe Thoughts
These donuts were less sweet than I expected, despite adding the sprinkles. One factor might be that I used buttermilk pancake mix instead of non-buttermilk. For future pancake-mix baked donuts, I would use non-buttermilk mix, add maybe an extra tablespoon of sugar, and add 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.

As for the decorations, some nonpareils, because of their spheroid shape, tended to roll willy nilly when I didn't aim well as I shook them onto first row. I might use only jimmies for future batches, maybe measuring and stirring 2 tablespoons into the batter before dispensing into the wells.

Nutrition: Calories for each donut is about 90; sodium is about 200. Check out nutrition tables for Krispy Kreme and Duncan Donuts.

Cost considerations: My pancake powder cost less than $1.50 for 32 ounces (~7 1/2 cups), lots less expensive than scratch ingredients, and way less expensive than similar recipes using cake mix. This half-dozen donut batch cost about 20¢ (a smidge over 3¢ each). The decorations add a nit extra cost. (Consider how much convenient store-bought donuts cost these days.) If you don't have a donut pan, consider buying one and economize for future donuts.

Related articles from me:

• Instant Pancake Mix, Info Table, Etc., for 12 Brands Includes ingredient info for 12 pancake mix brands.
• Confetti Cupcake Bites
  Includes info about nonpareils and jimmies.

Related articles from others:

• Pancake Mix Baked Donuts
  Uses 6-well donut pan (measurements in metric).
• Pancake Mix Donuts
  Uses donut maker.
• quick & easy {baked} cake mix donuts recipe
  Uses Babycakes DN-6 Mini Doughnut Maker, and calls for a full box of cake mix.
• Funfetti Doughnuts
  This shockingly expensive recipe uses fewer ingredients than scratch. However, this between-scratch-and-convenience recipe calls for ingredients that send the cost of donuts into the stratosphere.
• Baked Vanilla Doughnuts
  Uses 2 6-well donut pans (scratch ingredients). This Parade Magazine recipe was the original inspiration for me to try out my donut pan.

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Additional pancake-theme articles:

• Delivery Pancakes or Not
• Whataburger Pancakes, Mix, or Scratch
• Instant Pancake Mix, Info Table, Etc., for 12 Brands

Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel

The first time I'd become aware of bagels was about the early 90s. Oh, I'd encountered "bagels and lox" in books occasionally, but never gave them much thought. Seems when I read about them and saw pictures, they mystified me. They looked like doughnuts. Sometime shortly thereafter, I bought one. I ate it as though it were a doughnut. Hmmm. Kinda plain, not sweet. (Hadn't thought about the lox; thought cream cheese sounded icky.)

Over the years, I'd eat them in spurts. Sometimes a co-worker would bring in a box of them, accompanied with little containers of specialty cream cheeses. I really liked the salmon-flavored ones, also the jalapeno ones. Now I've finally settled into eating them mostly toasted, with a layer of butter.

I sometimes wondered about bagel denseness contrasted with store bread. Whenever I occasionally bought bagels at bagel stores, the stores tended not to list caloric information. Maybe I was too much into the out-of-sight-out-of-mind mode to bother looking up nutritional information.

In any case, bagels have become another bread aisle staple, in the same area as loaf bread, buns, and English muffins, with something called sandwich rounds starting to make appearances. Not long after I started to add bagels to the weekly shopping list, I looked at the nutrition table. Wow! 300 calories! That's about the same amount of calories as four slices of bread! Now, my days of eating one whole bagel (or more) at a time are gone, hopefully not to return.

The other day as I started the butter smear on my toasted half bagel, it crystalized in my brain that the hole in the middle makes the smearing inconvenient. I then thought about other times I'd thought about bagels and their holes. Bagel shops sell sandwiches on bagels. Occasionally, I'd bought bagels that had almost no hole. (I attributed the condition to the bagel dough preparer using a small ring to cut the dough instead of using a big one.) Most times, holes seemed to be about an inch in diameter.

I had thought using a bagel absent a hole at all would make a better sandwich than using a bagel where you need to be artful with the spreader; otherwise, condiments fall through. Also, if you're going to eat bites that have bread for each bite, it seems odd to run into breadless bites. The spreading care is even more crucial if buttering or creamcheesing a toasted bagel.

Why do bagels have holes? According to answerbag.com, the serious answer is that the holes allow thorough cooking of the bagels. "History of the Bagel: The Hole Story" has some history of the bagel in addition to details about the hole. Googling keywords "bagels no holes" yields numerous results. Closely related to why holes is how to make them. I ran across three ways to make them, none of which involve use of a cooky cutter device as I originally thought might be the case.

From baking911.com—

Hole in the Middle Method: From a ball shape, moisten your finger with water and poke your index finger through the center to form the hole. Moisten your finger with water, if necessary to smooth and to reshape the sides. Pull gently to enlarge hole.

The Hole Around the Finger Method: Flatten the ball of dough slightly into a disk shape, folding the bottom edge under and smoothing it until it looks like a doughnut shape. Make a hole in the center of the circle from the bottom up and twirl around your index finger to widen the hole. Reshape the round into a doughnut shape.

The Tube Around the Palm of the Hand Method: To form the bagels, take each piece of dough and roll it into a ball. Flatten the ball, then fold it in half, sealing the edges with your fingertips. Then fold again to form a tight cylinder. Roll the dough into a tube about 9 inches long. Wrap this piece around the palm of your hand, overlapping the dough about 2 inches. Pinch the ends together to form a ring. I like this way because it is quite fast.

Besides explicit information about shaping bagel dough to make the holes, Baking911.com has lots of detailed background and techniques throughout the stages of bagel making—even a q/a section. A passage that had caught my eye was "Boil on each side, about 3 minutes or less at a time, turning with a slotted spoon or skimmer. When done, the bagel will be puffy and the center will be nearly closed." Soooo, it's possible commercial bagels might have larger holes than necessary (or for my taste, anyway. ).

Well, after having poked around some sites to find out why bagels have holes and also reading the methodologies, maybe I'll settle for the normalcy of most bagels having approximately 3/4" diameter holes. OTOH, it seems possible that homemade ones might yield almost-closed-hole results.

I have listed some promising recipes that use breadmaking machines. My criteria for recipes tend to be calls for few items and ease of the process. (Look in my blog index for any title that has "convenient" in it, then visit articles. The fewer the ingredients, the better, I say.)

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/1180/Breadmaker-Bagels129588.shtml
Lists 6 ingredients. Features a calculator for adjusting recipe ingredient amounts to numbers of servings.

http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/Basic-Bagel-For-the-Bread-Machine-55609
Lists 5 ingredients for the bagels, 2 additional for egg wash substitute for Pam-type spray. Also includes recipes for bagel sticks and chips.

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=5812.0
Lists 5 ingredients, accompanied by numerous comments.