Perfect for Beginners: How To Make Doughnuts at Home

Look at those doughnuts. Is your mouth watering yet?

Here’s How To Make Donuts at Home… You’re Welcome 🙂

How about if I told you that you could make these amazing treats, serving them warm and golden to your family, with no knowledge whatsoever of yeast or dough, no special equipment other than what you likely have on hand, and have them done start to finish in under ten minutes, including prep time?

We Southerners (and humans in general), love our doughnuts. Mama says you always need to drink a diet coke with doughnuts because it cancels out the calories. Don’t try that at home 😉

The most important thing about this doughnut making recipe though is that you begin with CANNED BISCUITS. No, they do NOT taste anything like a biscuit when you are done. They taste every bit as melt in your mouth good as they look!

Ingredients for Making Doughnuts at Home

You’ll need

Vegetable oil
Canned biscuits for the doughnuts
Butter
Cinnamon
And sugar for the coating.

TIP: For the biscuits, any style at all will do, just don’t get the flaky layers because they will absorb the oil whereas normal biscuits won’t if we get our oil hot enough before frying them.

Cinnamon Sugar Mixture

In a bowl, stir together cinnamon and sugar and set that aside.
Melt a stick of butter in another bowl and set aside as well. Now they will both be handy as soon as the doughnuts are done.

Making the doughnut hole

Now you can go buy a doughnut cutter or some other fancy finagled device (which I actually have tucked away in the dark recesses of my kitchen drawers) but I like to show y’all how to do things the simple way. I’m a big fan of not over complicating a simple matter. For that very reason, we are going to just use a plain old 20 oz bottle cap to cut the centers of our doughnuts out.

Cut out the holes in every doughnut, reserving them to cook along with the doughnuts.

Voila, our doughnuts are done.

Pour your oil in a skillet. You need a little less than a half inch.

Heat your oil on medium to medium high for several minutes. We want it to be hot so that our doughnuts are instantly seared when they enter it. This prevents them from absorbing too much of the oil and being soggy. However, we don’t want it too hot so that the outside gets done before the inside.

TIP: To test my oil, I put a doughnut hole in it. It should sizzle and bubble around the edges and then you know its hot enough. You may need to turn your heat down a bit after testing it with some doughnut holes to see if it is just right. Once the doughnut hole is golden, remove it and let it cool a minute before taking a bite to make sure it’s fully cooked, not gooey, in the center.

Time to cook the doughnuts!

TIP: If your skillet isn’t big enough you may have to do them in batches. By the time you have put them all in, some may already be ready to turn. It takes less than a minute for them to be ready to turn over.

This is how they look, nice and golden.

Turn them all over and let them cook until the undersides are this way. All in all, this should take less than two minutes.
Remove cooked doughnuts from oil and place on paper towel lined plate or a drying rack if you’re feeling fancy.
Now do the same thing with the doughnut holes.

Here are our cooked doughnuts, now let’s add a little bit of heaven to them!

The doughnuts should have cooled just enough so that you can handle them but they will still be very warm.
Pick each one up and dip both sides in melted butter…