Funnel Cakes Recipe (Fried Dough) - Gemma's Bigger Bolder Baking

Hi Bold Bakers! One of the best things about summertime is going to the fair and trying fair food. Fair food is pretty much everything and anything fried. Now a really good example of this is funnel cake. This delicacy is fried batter with strawberry sauce on top and whipped cream. And let me tell you, you have not lived until you have tried this. The recipe is on my website, BiggerBolderBaking.com, along with all of my other fun summer recipes. Okay, we're going to start out in a nice large bowl. So we're going to sift together some flour, baking powder, and salt. So the reason that we're sifting it is just to get out any lumps. Okay, so those are our dry ingredients, now into here I'm going to add in some eggs, and milk. And then with a whisk, you do this all by hand, super easy, just whisk it together until you form a batter. So now if you don't eat eggs, you can replace each egg with 4 tablespoons of milk, and that will work well too. Okay, so this is our batter looking great, now I'm going to pop this into the fridge, let it just rest up for around 30 minutes, and we're going to make our strawberry sauce. Into a heavy bottom saucepan, we are going to add some quartered strawberries, a little bit of sugar, and some water. Now you just want to turn this to like a medium-low heat, and just let this mix come to a simmer, just for a few minutes. So our strawberries have been simmering for around 4-5 minutes, they're nice and soft, so at this point, I'm going to add in our cornstarch that is mixed with a little bit of water, and when you add that in, you want to just give it a stir around to make sure that it just mixes with everything else and there's no lumps. Lovely, you can see it already starting to thicken the sauce. And then I'm going to add in a little bit of vanilla extract. So we're just going to let this simmer for another minute or so, just to let the cornstarch activate, and then you're going to turn it off the heat, and set it aside. So while my strawberry sauce is cooling down, I have a saucepan over here, with around an inch and a half to two inches of oil, now you can use any kind of flavorless oil, canola, vegetable, I just don't recommend olive oil or coconut oil. So I have this on a medium-to-low heat, and I'm just going to let that heat up. So here I have a piping bag to pipe my batter into my frying pan. You can also use a Ziploc bag, or obviously you can use a funnel to get that lovely fun shape. So all I'm going to do is just fill this up with my batter, then cut a small hole in the bottom, into our oil that's nice medium heat, pretty much just start to write like you're doing a pen, just squiggle all the way around, you can get creative, go back and forth, no matter what you do here, this funnel cake is going to look great. Perfect. So you want around half a cup of batter per funnel cake, lovely. And now we're just going to let that simmer for around three minutes on each side, until it's golden brown. You'll see it start to turn brown pretty quickly. Without a doubt, this is a summer recipe, I remember the first fair that I went to in California, it was actually the Marin County Fair that I went with Kevin. So much fun, great food, rides, there was animals, there was a cow trying to lick Kevin, it was really like so much fun. If you have a fair near you, I strongly suggest that you go. So it's been three minutes, I can see that my funnel cake is nice and brown, carefully turn it over and cook it for another three minutes on the other side. So there you have a beautiful funnel cake, almost ready to be eaten, I'm just going to cook off the rest of the batter first. This is a really easy and fun recipe to make at home, and honestly you only need around two inches of oil, you don't need to fill up a pot with oil, just a little bit and it will fry them just fine. Once they're all fried off, they are ready to be decorated. So here I have mine on a plate, and I'm going to dust it very generously with some icing sugar. Then I'm going to add some of our cooled down strawberry sauce, look at that, it's a lovely color as well. And then to top it all off, we've got a little bit of whipped cream right here. Fantastic. Look at that. Without a doubt, a feast for the eyes and for the tummy. One of the benefits to this recipe, from start to finish, it is really fast. So in no time at all, you're going to be enjoying homemade funnel cake. Oh man. Seriously, what could be bad about fried batter, cream, strawberries, sugar? I'm telling you, you haven't lived until you've tried this. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and make sure you check out BiggerBolderBaking.com because I've got tons of recipes up there perfect for summertime. I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.