Baked Cake-Mix Doughnuts

So for Christmas my amazing roommate gave me a doughnut pan- a simultaneously amazing and terrible gift.  And today is her 21st birthday.  So, naturally I am making doughnuts :)  Normally, I am of the opinion that if you have basic ingredients you shouldn't need a cake mix, BUT my mom had a ton of them (I mean and entire case) and so I took a few back to school with me.

Today I made yellow cake donuts (doughnuts? what is the proper spelling?) I also attempted a caramel glaze, which worked fine, but doesn't go super well with the already incredibly sweet yellow cake.

Cake Mix Doughnuts:

Ingredients:
1 box cake mix (you can do any flavor)
1 stick butter melted (yes a whole stick, I'll get back to this later)
2 eggs
1 cup milk

Basic instructions:  mix everything together, spoon it into a gallon zip lock and snip off the end, fill well greased doughnut pan about 2/3 full, bake at 350 degrees for about 12-16 minutes.  Remove from oven and flip the pan onto a plate or cookie sheet.

so pretty!

More detailed instructions:  Step one- turn on your awesome Pandora station where Taylor Swift comes on right after Piano Man, not sure how that happens.
Step 2: follow basic instructions, except maybe change the ingredients around a bit.  For this recipe I actually  cut the butter by 3 tablespoons and used 1/2 cup milk and substituted the rest in applesauce.  I did this more because I ran out of (my roommates') milk and wanted to make sure I had enough butter for the sauce than because I'm watching calories.  I am watching calories. I watch them all the way from the plate to my mouth. But seriously, the applesauce makes just as good of a doughnut.

Not so pretty :(

Step 3:  GREASE YOUR PAN.  Please for the love of all things good grease that sucker.  Its very disappointing when your doughnuts come out so beautifully and then they break to bits.  Grease it between every batch.  Even if you think its greased enough, do it again.  I'm telling you, better too much than not enough.  I mean really, you're baking them.  The alternative is literally boiling them in grease, you can afford another spray of the Pam.


Caramel Glaze (this would probably work better on a less sweet doughnut)

Ingredients:
4 tbsp butter
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup cream
1 tbsp vanilla

Melt the butter in your saucepan.  Then whisk in the sugar and let it boil for about 4 minutes.  Then add your cream and vanilla and keep whisking.  Let it all boil for about 10 minutes stirring occasionally.

I actually used milk instead of cream (because really, who has cream around?)  But I think the cream would have been better.  It turned out pretty thin and not as creamy as I would have liked.

Warning!  This burns incredibly easily.  If you have a gas stove like I do, you have to be really really careful. Once it starts to boil furiously pull it off the heat for a few seconds.  Trust me when I say you do not want that burned and nasty smelling mess on your hands.

Egg Noodles :)

Egg noodles are shockingly simple.  I've looked up recipes but I also tend to just eye it.  So the ingredients are just flour, eggs, and salt.  I start with "a bunch" of flour, about 3 cups if you want a measurement.  Add about 1/2- 3/4 teaspoon of salt, more if you like it salty, and then 2-3 eggs.  I mix them up with my hands (Murphy's law of cooking says that this will be the time that no less than four people will be texting you) until the dough can make a pretty smooth ball.  I usually start with 2 eggs and see what the texture is like after mixing that thoroughly, and add another if it needs more liquid.  After three eggs, you can always start adding a teaspoon of water at a time if its still too dry until you get a good texture.

Then grab a handful of the dough (about 1/4 of the total but it really doesn't matter) and plunk it on a (very!) well floured countertop.  Roll it out with your handy dandy wine bottle using more flour to keep the dough from sticking.  When you have it as thin as you want, use a sharp knife or pizza cutter to cut the noodles into strips.  Thicker rolls of dough taste more and more like baby dumplings, thinner have more of a noodley texture.  3 cups of flour makes enough noodles for a good sized crock pot of chicken soup.  But of course, since this recipe is so simple you can cut it down to 1 cup of flour and 1 egg to make noodles for one or two people.  You can let your uncooked noodles rest for a day or so in a sealed container but I never have time or foresight for that.  To cook- drop your noodles into boiling water for about 10 minutes.  If you're adding them to a crock-pot soup, you can simply put them in the broth about half an hour before you want to eat :)

You can add flavoring to the dough as well.  (My guy friend said that the recipe above wasn't interesting enough.  This is for people like him.)  Thus far I've only done garlic and spinach but I've seen recipes for beet, pumpkin, and carrot flavored pasta.  For spinach pasta I sauteed some minced garlic in about a tablespoon of olive oil for about a minute, then added a LOT of spinach.  Really, it seems like filling the entire 12 inch frying pan with an inch and a half of spinach would be too much, but it cooks down so much that I actually filled it a second time.  So all in all I used about 1/2 of a bag of spinach.  Then you put the hot mess right into the blender and pulverize it.  Add the spinach puree to the dough before you add your eggs, and adjust the number of eggs according to how sticky the dough is.  The puree substitutes about 1 egg.  Then roll out your pretty green dough just like before.  I sauteed a few tomatoes chunked up with garlic for a sauce.  And it was divine!

Feel free to play with this recipe!  If you think a little melted butter is in order, use that instead of water to make the dough the right texture, or use milk.  This is just the basic proportions that I use and it has worked well for me!

Introductions

Hello there blogosphere!  This being my first post on my brand spanking new blog, I'm a little unsure what to write.  I suppose just an overview of things to come would be helpful.

I am creating this page as a space where I can essentially brag about what crafty and culinary type things that I've been doing without annoying too many of my Facebook friends.  While I'm sure they'd all LOVE to know what I made for dinner, perhaps this will be more helpful to all involved since I can put links to recipes and whatnot.

A little about me- I am a 21 year old college junior.  I'm pretty sure that I have undiagnosed ADD because it is impossible for me to sit still and so in every spare moment I am doing something crafty or I'm trying new recipes.  I can't even sit and watch a show without doing something.  My particular interests include lampworking beads (aka glass on a blowtorch), and baking.  I've also been trying my hand at sewing, but I've had terrible luck with sewing machines dying on me in the last two months.

My current model- notice the flour still on it from tortillas last night.

I should probably explain the title- Wine Bottle Rolling Pin.  Well I guess maybe not since its pretty self-explanatory, but basically I'm too cheap to buy proper kitchen equipment when things I have already will suffice.  I found this out when I went to make homemade egg noodles for chicken soup, but didn't have anything to roll them out with.  Then I spotted my roommate's bottle of wine that had a little penguin on it, and I figured it had less than a glass left and she wouldn't care.  So my cheap-o rolling pin was born.  I have since bought my own bottle of wine (for less than $4 I might add) and it has served me well for spinach fettuccine and homemade tortillas :)