Red Velvet Donuts (Baked Not Fried) Gemma's Bigger Bolder Baking Ep 195

Hi Bold Bakers! You know I'm a huge fan of red velvet desserts. I've made red velvet cake in a mug and I've even made a red velvet lava cake. Well today I'm going to take it a step further and we are going to make lovely red velvet donuts. So let's get baking! For those of you who don't know, I have hundreds of recipes on BiggerBolderBaking.com so head over there, explore my website because I even have recipes that I don't publish on YouTube and there's a lot of great ones over there. Okay, let's make our donuts. We're going to start out in a large bowl. Add in your flour, sugar, sieved cocoa powder, cinnamon, and baking soda. And then whisk all these ingredients together. Now I have a rule that I always sift my cocoa powder because if you don't, you can end up with lumps in your cake or your donuts or whatever it is, so just make sure you always sift it. Okay, so that's our dry ingredients, now I'm going to set those aside and we're going to mix together our wet ingredients. So here I have some butter and I'm just going to pop this guy into the microwave and melt it for around 20-30 seconds. So into our melted butter, I'm going to add in some buttermilk. Now if you don't have buttermilk, you can always make your own and I've got an easy recipe for that or you can just substitute it with regular milk. So next we're going to add in some vinegar. Now you can use apple cider vinegar or you can use a distilled white vinegar. What this does, it makes our donuts really lovely and tender. It breaks down the gluten in the flour. So in you go, lovely. Next we're going to crack in some eggs. Now if you don't eat eggs, you can always check out my egg substitute chart, you can replace them with banana, applesauce, something like that. Next we're going to add in some vanilla extract. Red velvet cake generally has vanilla extract in it to give it a really nice flavor. So in you go. Now last but not least, we're going to add in our red food coloring. Now this is my homemade version, you can always use store-bought, just please use good quality so you get a better result. Now what you want to do is just add in enough of this to get the desired color that you want. Sometimes the donuts don't come out bright, bright red because you have to add in a lot of color, but all we want is to get that nice red hue. Perfect. You want them a little bit redder, feel free to add in more. Then just get your whisk and mix these all together. So as you can tell, these are actually cake donuts and not yeasted donuts, which are even easier to make because you don't have to work with all the yeast and weight and all that sort of stuff, so these are much faster. And just as good. Okay, so now that's our wet ingredients all mixed up, now I'm going to bring back in my dry ingredients, and then we're going to pour our wet into our dry. Then with your whisk, just mix it together until there's no more lumps. It doesn't take much at all. Now just like with any baked goods, you know I say less is more, so don't mix it too much because you'll toughen your donuts, and we don't want that. This is looking great, look at that vibrant red color. Perfect. Okay, lovely. The color of these is spot on, it's exactly what I want. Now our next step is to get this into a piping bag and into our tin. So for baked donuts, you need a donut tin, but I do not have a donut tin, I have this. I have a homemade baked donut tin version, super easy to make, it's on my website, a really quick video, and all you have to use is tin foil or aluminum foil to make the shape of the mold, and you'll get lovely baked donuts. So check that video out. Right here, I have my mix in a piping bag, I like to put it into a piping bag just because you get a cleaner kind of looking donut, and all I'm going to do is just pipe it into my tin, roughly around half the way up, we want nice, big donuts. So just keep on going, filling all your tin. This mix will make around 12 donuts or so, which is the perfect amount for one person. And that's the last one, okay, fantastic! Now these guys are ready to go into the oven, and as quick as they are to make, they bake even faster. So you want to pop this into an oven at 350°F or 180°C for roughly 8-10 minutes. So while our donuts are in the oven, we're going to make good use of our time and whip up a nice, easy little frosting. So here in my bowl I have some cream cheese, now cream cheese and red velvet are like peanut butter and jelly, you have to have the two together. So I'm going to take this and I'm going to pop it into the microwave just to soften up my cream cheese a little bit for roughly around 20-25 seconds. Okay so my cream cheese is out, it's nice and soft, so into this I'm going to add in some icing sugar, in you go, and a little bit of milk. And then just whisk these together until you get the consistency that you want. Now if this is a little bit too thick or thin for you, add in a little bit of milk to thin it out or add in a little bit of icing sugar to thicken it up a little bit. Everybody likes their icing a little bit different. So there's our frosting and that's good because our timer just went off, so let's check on our donuts. You know when your donuts are perfectly baked because when you give them a little push, they're firm on top. So now this is the fun part, we have our donuts, we have our glaze, now it's time to finish them off. So here I have my donuts, now when they're cooled, you can peel away the tinfoil gently and then just pop them off and you get for yourself a perfectly shaped donut, look at that. How simple is that? And you don't need one of those fancy tins. So just do that with all of your donuts, take off the foil, perfect. Now it's time to start dipping them. So I like to take my donut and then very gently put it into the frosting, face forward, dunk them in there, get a nice bit of glaze, because I love me some glaze. Fantastic. Then let it drip off any excess, cool, and then put it onto your rack. There we go. And then just go ahead and dip all your other donuts. When it comes to donuts, the glaze is just as important as the donut itself, because they have to be complementary, don't they? They have to go with the cake that it is, like if it's a chocolate, it's a chocolate frosting, something like that. Red velvet and cream cheese, yep, that is one of my favorite things in the world. Fantastic. So now that they're all dipped, to finish them off, I have sacrificed one donut, and what I'm gonna do is just take a few of his crumbs and sprinkle them over the top, just to give an extra pop of color to the top of your donuts, and it just gives them a beautiful finish. Pretty simple but effective way to decorate, right? Gorgeous. These red velvet donuts turned out even better than expected. Who says a donut has to be fried for it to look and taste amazing? This is my favorite part of the job. If you love red velvet desserts, red velvet anything in fact, you are going to love these donuts, just like real red velvet cake, they're soft and moist and yummy. Mmm, a little hint of cocoa, fantastic. I really hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you haven't already done so, make sure you tap that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any of my upcoming videos, and I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.