Category: Dessert

I had a craving for cake last night, but there was none to be had, and no one was volunteering to bake a cake for me and I didn’t have the energy. So that was sad, but I went poking around in my pantry, and realized I had sweetened condensed milk, which reminded me of a classic dessert of my childhood, mixed tinned fruit with sweetened condensed milk, and we had fresh cherries, so I thought they might be good together, and Reader — they were.

The danger of easing into your day with a little GBBO is that you may decide that what you really want to make is a meringue bombé for your first post-COVID party on the coming weekend. (Everyone attending vaccinated, numbers very limited compared to previous years, we’re easing into this…)

I really don’t have time to experiment with meringue bombés right now!

But I might make a pavlova. That’s easy.  And so very summer…

The girls decided to do classic plain donuts, and also chocolate donuts. After they’d all gotten a chance to make some, Kevin took over making the donuts, while the girls worked on glazes.

After we got the beignet batter ready and set it to rising, we switched to mini-donuts. I’d gotten Kavi a mini donut maker for her birthday, and I pretty much just talked the girls through a couple of the recipes in there — they could do it all themselves. It’s really more like waffles than donuts, in some sense, but they were very happy with the results. And they learned how to use a pastry bag, so that’s good.

Donuts! Initially, actually, we worked on beignets; she really likes them, so was excited to learn how to make them. We made a yeast dough, let it rise, punched it down, rolled it out, cut it into squares, deep-fried the squares, and shook powdered sugar over. (And a drizzle of chocolate on a few.)

All the girls got to try deep-frying, so it was satisfying teaching them something useful.