Some doughnut baking, yummy tasting fun

The perfect Valentine’s Day treat for lovers and singles

I want. Om nom now. / Laura Billett

The first step to baking successfully is good music. You need to be able to rock around your kitchen while mixing, measuring, and shaping sweet delicious desserts. This brings me to my next baking prerequisite: you need to have the kitchen to yourself. No pesky roommates or family members can get in your way. You must be able to fly from pantry, to mixer, to oven without bumping into others.

Also, if you are doing it correctly, you’ll be wildly grooving to your awesome music, so it is safer to be alone. You should not have to choose between helping that poor soul with a bleeding nose and taking something out of the oven.

When your kitchen is clear, and you have chosen your mood-appropriate playlist, you are ready to begin!

For Valentine’s Day, the options are endless. If you make anything that is red velvet, chocolate, or raspberry/strawberry accented, you will fit right in with the festivities.

I almost decided on a weird version of a red velvet cake because it had holes in it, which would later be filled with cream cheese flavoured pudding. I thought punching holes in a cake might be a good emotional release for those who will be eating the entire cake alone on this wretched day.

However, in the end I decided against the recipe because I didn’t want to promote violence, and I thought cream cheese pudding sounded gross.

Thus, I settled on another hole-filled cake — a doughnut cake! Wow, who would have guessed this existed. Apparently quite a few people have already jumped on the make-your-own-doughnut wagon, because a surprising amount of baked doughnut recipes are on Pinterest. After seeing a chocolate, coffee, and doughnut cake, I couldn’t resist any longer. I said goodbye to red and pink themed baking and set out to discover if a baked doughnut tastes anything like a deep-fried one.

The doughnuts themselves were extremely easy to make. I baked them in muffin tins and cut holes out of them once they were cooled to get the correct shape. In the end, I probably didn’t have to make the holes because the doughnuts ended up stacked on top of each other, covered with mocha whipped cream. Regardless, it was fun to do and satisfying to see mini doughnuts line my counter.

So how did this doughnut cake turn out? Well, as you can see from the photo, the cake does not look like a cake, nor do the doughnuts look super doughnut-like. To be honest, it tasted like whipped cream and mocha, with some cakey matter thrown in there. But hey, I will not complain about that. It was easy, fun to make, and did not require ingredients (other than copious amounts of cream) that I didn’t already have.

If you are feeling fun and not too worried about having a somewhat lopsided cake to show off to your special someone or your special self, a doughnut cake is an easy, fun option for good ol’ Valentine’s Day.