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.