A Tale of Two Donuts

For Thanksgiving this year, Nana decided that everybody had to make a dessert. It was one of the best ideas she’s ever had, and it gave me a chance to try a new recipe I had come across on the Twitter. Since everyone else would surely make pies and cakes of various sorts, I decided to go a different route: donuts. (This decision was half inspired by Chinese donuts, which we would always get for dessert at Chinese restaurants when I was a kid. Have you ever had one? THEY ARE AMAZING. They’re little balls of fried doughy perfection rolled around in sugar. Or possibly crack, they’re that good. If you’ve never had one, go to your nearest Chinese buffet and get one right now.) Anyway, I had seen a recipe for baked pumpkin donuts rolled around in cinnamon and sugar and knew that they would be perfect for Thanksgiving.

However, given that I am a master procrastinator and went donut supply shopping on Thanksgiving Eve day, I was unable to obtain a donut pan. I’m pretty resourceful though, and was able to use my muffin pans–if you are ever in a similar jam, you can bake your donut-muffin hybrids half way, take them out of the oven and make holes in the middle with your finger or the non-eating end of some utensil, then put them back in the oven to finish cooking. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough.

It’s hard to tell if my mom was embarrassed by my donuffins (ugh, I thought I was onto something with that term…Google says I am not) or felt bad for me, but about a week after T-Day, a package arrived in the mail containing two mini donut pans. They are adorable, and now all I want to do is make donuts all the time.

Fortunately, I had a
reason to valid reason to make more donuts tonight (if I just did it every time I felt like it, I would weigh approximately 763 pounds): the office Christmas party tomorrow. It’s a potluck, as I assume most office holiday parties are (this is my first one!), and when I was looking at the list of what people were bringing, nobody had volunteered to bring in something dessert-y yet (probably because, unlike me, they all knew that throughout the month tons–literally, tons!–of sweets would trickle into the department) so I put myself down for pumpkin gingerbread. Then I remembered my cute donut pans, and found this recipe. Perfect!

So I just spent the last two hours making four dozen mini pumpkin gingerbread donuts, and now I just want to eat ALL OF THEM. I ate one (ok, fine, two!) to taste test, and they’re pretty yummy. Now the rest of them are tucked away in my kitchen taunting me and it’s not nice.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a yoga day, but it may have to be another run day to justify the disgusting amount of food I’ve been eating over the last few days, and will continue to eat over the next week.