Lotus Biscoff Doughnuts for Food 'n' Flix - Knives Out

I used to take part in a blog challenge called Food ‘n’ Flix where the person hosting each month chooses a movie and everyone taking part bakes something inspired by that film. It got me to watch quite a few films I otherwise would never have seen and to try a few recipes I almost certainly wouldn’t have made otherwise!

As I’ve been baking and blogging less it fell off my radar a bit for the past couple of years but I came across it again last month. Wendy from A Day In the Life on theFarm chose the film Knives Out, which had been on my 'to watch' list for a little while, so it was a good reason to bump it to the top!

I wasn't sure what to expect from the film, which stars Daniel Craig as a detective trying to solve the mystery of a family patriarch's death. His family members all seem to have secrets and possible motives for their involvement in what may or may not be a murder, though the police have ruled it a suicide. There is an all-star cast including Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Chris Evans and Christopher Plummer, and the film reminds me of an Agatha Christie-style 'whodunnit' - but at the same time it's also very funny. I really enjoyed watching the film as it made a nice change from the sort of things we usually watch.

In terms of food references and inspiration, there's a lot of indirect inspiration that could be taken from the family setting, but I prefer with this challenge to use a direct reference. There's one scene set in a restaurant where one of the main characters eats sausage and beans - a dish my husband would enjoy but I hate beans so this wasn't one for me. What actually stuck in my mind more was doughnuts!

There's a scene where Daniel Craig's detective Benoit Blanc summarises how confusing the case appears to be, saying: "A doughnut hole in the doughnut's hole. But we must look a little closer. And when we do, we see that the doughnut hole has a hole in its center - it is not a doughnut hole at all but a smaller doughnut with its own hole, and our doughnut is not whole at all!"

After that, all I wanted was a doughnut, so that's what I decided to make! I've never tried to make proper doughnuts as they need to be fried - I don't have a deep-fat fryer and don't really fancy filling a pan with that much oil. Instead, I've made baked doughnuts a few times and have the Wilton doughnut pan which makes these really easy.

I used this recipe for the doughnuts from the Wilton website.

When it came to decorating them, I was missing Doughnut Time (yes I know they deliver but I don't think it's a good idea for my husband and I to have a box of six of their doughnuts between us!) but I still wanted to do some sort of indulgent filling and topping. Lotus Biscoff immediately sprang to mind, since as well as the biscuits, they make a spread which I could eat just from the jar! I used some of the spread to fill the doughnuts (which I sliced through the middle - I wasn't quite up to injecting the filling like shop-bought ones!) and then covered the top in a chocolate glaze which I made from a mixture of chocolate and butter. 

I poured the chocolate glaze over the top and topped with a Lotus Biscoff chocolate biscuit. These weren't as gooey or indeed a patch on the ones I've had from Doughnut Time but they were very good and didn't last long!

I'm sharing this with A Day in the Life on the Farm for November's Food 'n' Flix challenge.

London's best doughnut? Doughnut Time review

Something about lockdown has made me start thinking about doughnuts a lot. You just can’t get them with your online grocery order – which is making me want them even more. For some reason, the fresh bakery items like a fresh unsliced loaf of bread or a simple doughnut doesn’t seem to be an option. I’ve even been browsing websites like Krispy Kreme and Doughnut Time to see what they can deliver, then deciding I shouldn’t be bulk buying that sort of thing at the moment anyway!

But it reminded me of when I started my new job and found a doughnut shop called Doughnut Time.

It’s right up there with the super-indulgent once in a blue moon treat – they look so calorific and are also pretty expensive, as far as doughnuts go - £4.50 each when you can get a pack of five for under a quid from supermarkets. But these are not your average supermarket doughnut, and indeed they are (in my opinion) a cut above Krispy Kreme, which until now I thought was the gold standard of doughnuts (mass produced ones, anyway).

Doughnut Time’s doughnuts are big – and I mean massive. They even sell a sharing size one for £17 that would be a good alternative for a birthday cake – but I think their regular sized ones would easily do two people.

The doughnuts themselves are light and springy with just the right amount of chewiness – really good. But it’s the toppings where they come into their own, complete with quirky puns for names.

For instance:

Bellatwix Lestrange – topped with chocolate glaze, biscuit crumb, chocolate flakes, caramel drizzle and a Twix

Apple Crumble & Fitch -a vegan offering with an apple pie filling covered in caramel glaze and Lotus Biscoff crumble

Bueno Mars – Hazelnut cream filling, milk and dark chocolate glaze with Nutella, wafer and Kinder Bueno pieces

Stranger Rings 2.0 – chocolate glazed doughnut with Oreo crumbs, Nutella and glitter              

Ruby Rose – strawberry glaze, filled with strawberry cheesecake, topped with marshmallows, wafers, raspberries and a ruby KitKat.

The shop window literally stops passers-by in their tracks and inside the shop is basically just a tiny counter with space for about two people to pay and take the doughnuts away (they provide boxes). (NB – I haven’t been here since before COVID; they have about a dozen stores that are open around London at the moment and they advise you follow them on Instagram to find out which stores are currently open).

I’ve actually been here three times now, and have tried the Ruby Rose and the Bueno Mars – both amazing but the former seems lighter due to the cheesecake and the flavour, which is a good thing, and my husband has had the Stranger Rings 2.0 and Ice Ice Bae Bae – vanilla buttercream, vegan cookie pieces, chocolate chip cookie dough and chocolate chips. I didn’t even bother telling him this one was vegan as I knew he’d love the cookie dough! We also had their Valentine's special - I can't remember what it was called but it wasn't as good as the Bruno Mars!

Did I mention that they do a DIY kit to decorate your doughnut at home – the doughnuts are of course provided. I may have to treat myself soon….

Mini Lebkuchen Doughnuts for Christmas

Lebkuchen is a German biscuit-cum-cake, a bit like gingerbread, that is traditionally eaten at Christmas; they are easy to find in UK supermarkets but having also lived in Germany for two separate periods between the ages of 18 and 22 (both including Christmas) I became quite keen on them.

I thought about making some Lebkuchen at Christmas but didn't get around to it; instead I decided to make some baked mini doughnuts using my Wilton doughnut pan which I was going to flavour with gingerbread spices, but then remembered I had a small packet of actual mixed spices for Lebkuchen that a German colleague had given me a little while ago that I'd never used. So the doughnuts tasted of Lebkuchen and I glazed them with chocolate as Lebkuchen often are.

I used this pan and the Wilton recipe to make Halloween doughnuts last year though I found the batter really thick - possibly because my buttermilk had set quite thick in the fridge - so also added some milk, and switched the plain flour and baking power for self-raising flour as follows:

300g self-raising flour
175g caster sugar
175ml buttermilk
50ml milk
2 tbsp. butter, melted
1/2 x 15g sachet of Ostmann Lebkuchen gewurtz
to decorate: 100g plain chocolate

As an alternative to the ready made Lebkuchen spice mix, you could use:
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp coriander
1/4 tsp ground cardamon
1/4 tsp allspice

Preheat oven to 200C. Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl until you have a batter that is a dropping consistency.

Grease a doughnut pan - you could also try making these as cupcakes in a cupcake tin - and drop in the batter so each doughnut ring is 2/3 full. This quantity will make two batches of 10-12 doughnuts. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 10-12 minutes.

Allow to cool in the tin then turn out onto a wire rack. Melt some plain chocolate in a microwave or bain-marie and spread over one side of the doughnuts and allow to set.

I allowed myself to try a bit even though I'm supposed to be cutting out sugar - it is Christmas after all and I hoped that a few bites wouldn't hurt - and they were delicious, tasting a lot like lebkuchen!

D'lish Donut Shopkins Birthday Cake

Do you know what Shopkins are? If you have children then you might… if like me you are yet to become a parent then you can be excused for having absolutely no idea!

 

I’ve written before about the fantastic charity Free Cakes for Kids – I made a Rapunzel cake for a girl who otherwise wouldn’t have had a birthday cake.

 

Another request came through from the same group that I decided to volunteer for, for a child who would like a Shopkins cake, even though I didn’t know what that was. Shopkins turned out to be a collection of characters based on items you find in the supermarket – everything from cakes to fruit to a loaf of bread, bottle of bubble bath and even clothes and shoes. They have names like Suzie Sundaw, Mandy Candy and Angie Ankle Boot.

 

I browsed the website for a while until I was able to find a character I thought I could easily incorporate into a cake and remembered I had a giant doughnut cake mould I bought in the sale ages ago and had never used. There is a Shopkins character called D’lish Donut that looks like a pink iced ring doughnut with sprinkles (and of course arms, legs and a face) which I thought would be perfect.

 

The mould comes in two pieces - simply grease them and fill with cake mix.

 

I used a standard Victoria sponge cake recipe for this cake – as it was for a child, I wanted to avoid strong flavours or making it too rich and thought that the icing would be sugary enough!

 

 

 

 I filled the cake with jam and buttercream – the cake mould worked perfectly, turning out the bake cake into a perfect ring doughnut shape.

 

 

 

It wasn’t too hard to decorate – I decided water icing with pink food colouring might be too runny and not look very neat so I coloured some white roll-out fondant, cut it into a  circle large enough to go over the cake and cut a space in the middle. The arms and legs are also made of fondant, and I used some tiny plunger cutters to cut out diamonds from pink, blue and yellow fondant, and stuck them with a dab of water on top to look like sprinkles.

 

The eyes took a couple of attempts and my husband actually ended up helping with these! We made four circles of diminishing size in white, blue, black and white, and layered them to make the eyes. I then used black fondant to make a nose and some eyelashes and pink fondant for the mouth.
 

 

I put the cake onto a silver board and at the last minute decided to spell out the little girl’s name with leftover icing. I had a lovely email afterwards from the charity co-ordinator saying she had been really pleased with her cake – it was fun for me to make a cake for a child and to copy a cartoon character as I don’t get a lot of opportunity to do that (my neice is 8 months old so too young for cake) – and of course I was able to do something good and help a charity that hopefully made a difference and helped that little girl have a happy birthday.

 

Spooky Halloween Doughnuts

I wasn't going to do any more Halloween baking this year but saw a video tutorial from Wilton, the US cake decorating brand, on Facebook for doughnuts and realised I had the doughnut tin that they used in the recipe. So I made a quick batch of baked doughnuts - they are quite easy to make as you bake them in the oven, so no hot oil to deal with - and decorated them as spider webs and pumpkins. Easy to do, and fun for the kids to join in with. You can even hand these out to any trick or treaters who come knocking!

I used this recipe from the Wilton website. Translated for UK bakers (we don't have 'cake flour' over here, you need:

2 cups (300g) plain flour
3/4 cup (175g) caster sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup (175ml) buttermilk
2 tbsp. butter, melted

to decorate:
icing sugar
water
black and orange food colouring (gel works best)

Preheat oven to 220C. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl and then beat in the buttermilk and butter until you have a thick batter.

 

 

 

To decorate, lay some kitchen towel or newspaper under your cooling rack as the icing will drip through. Mix icing sugar with a few drops of water, adding a few more drops until you have a thick and slightly runny consistency, that drops off the spoon but isn't liquid. Separate into three bowls with two containing more icing than the other - the smallest bowl is the one you will leave white.

Add orange food colouring (I used Wilton gel colour) to one bowl and black to another and beat in. Use a teaspoon to drizzle the orange icing over half the doughnuts. If you like you can add a green stalk for the pumpkin or even edible eyes if you have them or want to make them from fondant!

Cover the remaining doughnuts with black icing. While it is still tacky, spoon the white icing into a piping bag and snip off the end so you have a small opening. Pipe concentric white circles onto the black doughnuts. Take a cocktail stick (toothpick) and drag lines through the icing from the outside to the inside; this will give a spiderweb effect. Leave the icing to set and enjoy!

Grease a doughnut pan with Cake Release or similar and fill the holes until 3/4 full. Bake in the preheated oven for 7-9 minutes until risen and springy. Allow to cool in the pan for 5 minutes then cool on a cooling rack.

 

I'm sending these as a last-minute entry to the Food Calendar challenge hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

Utah Scones - a different take on doughnuts?

The letter that Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker has chosen for Alphabakes this month is a bit challenging - U. This is the second time through the alphabet in the blogging challenge which I co-host with Ros, and last time around I thought quite creatively and made this Umbongo cake from a recipe I devised myself, which I was really pleased with.

This time my mind went to Utah and my United Cakes of America cookery book, which I haven't used for a little while. I visited Utah as part of a US road trip in 2012 and ate some lovely food. The cookery book didn't let me down with a recipe for Utah Scones - these are pretty different to English scones as they are deep-fried. The book said they were similar to what people call "frybread" elsewhere in the US; as part of the same trip I ate Navajo fry bread in Arizona and these did remind me a bit of that, but they also reminded me of churros (only more dough-y) and also a little like doughnuts. You need to make the dough the day before you want it and be very careful when you are deep frying but otherwise these are pretty easy and taste really good with the recommended honey butter; my boyfriend had them with chocolate sauce and loved them.

This recipe makes about 24 so I'd recommend halving the quantities, though I didn't.
You need:

2 cups buttermilk
7g dried yeast
2 tbsp. warm water
5 cups plain flour
1 tbsp. vegetable oil plus extra for deep frying
1 tbsp. caster sugar
2 eggs
1.5 tsp baking powder

to serve: optional-
softened butter, runny honey
icing sugar
chocolate sauce

Dissolve the yeast in a small bowl with the warm water and leave for ten minutes.

Meanwhile warm the buttermilk and place in a large bowl (or stand mixer if you have one) with all the other ingredients apart from the optional serving suggestions. Add the yeast and water and beat everything together until you have a stiff dough.

Roll the dough out onto a flat baking tray, cover with a clean tea-towel and leave to prove in a warm place for about 30 minutes.

 

 

Punch down the dough, cover with clingfilm and refrigerate overnight.

 

When you are ready to cook the dough, cut into wide strips and then cut the strips into triangles.

Heat about 1 inch of oil in a frying pan and when the oil is hot, using tongs carefully place the triangles into the oil. Allow to bubble and cook on each side for a few minutes until browned, then carefully turn over and brown on the other side.

Remove from the oil with tongs or a fish slice and drain on kitchen paper. Sprinkle with icing sugar, or serve with honey butter (beat softened butter with runny honey to taste) or chocolate sauce.

These are pretty filling and definitely more of an occasional treat but I'm glad I discovered them!

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, hosted by Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter this month is U.

Baked Ring Doughnuts

Doughnuts are surprisingly easy to make - at least baked ring doughnuts are! I'd like to have a go at filled doughnuts at some point but the baked kind are definitely healthier than the deep fried ones and you can still make them look really pretty (and they taste good!) so I think this is a good place to start.

I was recently sent a selection of products to review from a German company called MeinCupcake, which also has the UK site CakeMart - if you haven't visited their website before I encourage you to take a look around, you might be surprised by what you find! They have a really wide range of products, for instance cookie cutters in every shape you can think of, and all sorts of other baking and cake decorating equipment.

I received this Wilton-branded doughnut pan from them to review and I knew immediately from the Wilton name that it would be good. I sprayed the pan with Cake Release and the doughnuts came out so easily and were perfectly shaped and golden brown. The only downside is that you can only make six at a time so you have to do a few batches -but I think I prefer these to the mini doughnut size and the pan is actually a good size to put away in the cupboard.

The pan comes with a recipe inside the card and that's what I used to make these doughnuts, though I used self-raising flour instead of 'cake flour' (it's an American recipe) and baking powder, used caster sugar as I don't keep granulated, and I didn't have any buttermilk so I made my own from milk and a squeeze of lemon juice.

This quantity made 14 doughnuts:
2 cups self-raising flour
3/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 eggs
2 tbsp. butter, melted
to decorate:
icing sugar and water, sprinkles
100g milk chocolate

Preheat oven to 180C. Spray a doughnut pan with Cake Release or similar.

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl and beat until well combined. Using a teaspoon carefully spoon the mixture into the pan making sure you don't cover the centre of the doughnut.

Bake for 7-9 minutes until golden brown. Remove from the tin to cool and repeat with the remaining mixture.

I decorated half of the doughnuts with white icing (icing sugar mixed with water) and coloured sprinkles from Dr. Oetker which looked really pretty. I decided the ones with the thicker icing looked better.

I then melted 100g milk chocolate in a bowl in the microwave and took the remaining doughnuts and dipped them directly into the melted chocolate. This gave a very even coating and I thought they looked really good.

I was going to visit some friends and meet their new baby at the weekend so I decided to take these doughnuts - well, most of them - as a gift.

Thanks to CakeMart for sending me the doughnut pan to review.

These doughnuts are quite cake-y and I think they are pretty, particularly the ones with the sprinkles, so I am sharing these with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK, as the theme is 'colour me pretty'.