Baked red velvet donuts: A delicious twist from Gemma's Bigger Bolder Baking

Bigger Bolder Baking with Gemma Stafford
2 followers
Nov 11, 2026
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, sifted 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
gonna set those aside and we're gonna mix
together our wet ingredients.
So here I have some butter and I'm just gonna 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 doughnuts 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 gonna add in some vanilla extract,
red velvet cake generally has vanilla extract
in it to give it 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 doughnuts don't come out like
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.
Do 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 that these are actually
cake doughnuts and not yeasted doughnuts,
which are even easier to make because you
don't have to work with all the yeast and
and weight and all that sort of stuff so these are much faster.
Just as good.
Okay, so now that's our wet ingredients all mixed up,
now I'm gonna bring back in my dry
ingredients and then we're gonna 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 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
gonna 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 gonna take this and I'm gonna 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 tin foil 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 them into the frosting,
face forward, dunk them in there, get a nice
bit of glaze, because I love me some glaze, fantastic.
And let it drip off any excess, cool, and then put it on to 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 complimentary, don't they?
They have to go with the cake that it is like if it's a chocolate,
it's a chocolate frosting,
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 doughnuts turned out even
better than expected. Who says a doughnut
has to be fried for it to look and taste amazing?
This is my favorite part of the job. Mmm.
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.
