Homemade Baked Donuts

 Every weekend, we have a junky breakfast of donuts and juice. Well, the juice is healthy, but those delicious glazed donuts from the grocery store bakery or the donut joint up the street are decidedly not. Since I am really working on eating local, healthy foods, I started to research alternatives. I saw a lot of fancy gizmos out there, but they didn't have the greatest reviews. In the end, I opted for a simple pan that lets me make mini baked donuts every weekend.

We've used our new Norpro 3980 12 count nonstick mini donut pan twice so far, so I feel like I can give a review of it now. I am pretty happy overall. The pan is easy to clean, bakes evenly and has a decent recipe for donuts with it. It is tough to fill those little holes neatly at first, but we got the hang of it.

The only thing I object to is the suggested baking time. It takes at least 15 minutes to bake our donuts instead of the eight minutes the recipe included with the pan calls for.

Also, if you are serious about making cake donuts every weekend, you may want to look for a second pan. Just when you're ready to clean up the mess, the first batch is finally done and you have to re-fill the pan. Both times, the kids had eaten their fill of donuts and didn't want to decorate the second batch because they'd moved on to another activity.

I'm sure the baked donut recipe included with the pan is absolutely delicious, but our goal was to go a little healthier, so I made a few little substitutions. Here is the recipe we used:

• 2 Cups Whole Wheat Flour - Make sure it has the wheat germ included. Some whole wheat flour takes all the goodness out and then has the nerve to still call itself whole wheat!
• 3/4 Cup Organic Cane Sugar - I don't know how much better it is, but it has to be healthier than regular sugar. I recently heard reports that sugar substitutes that weren't natural give our bodies trouble because they don't know how to process them.
• 2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
• 1 Teaspoon Salt
• `1 Tablespoon Melted Butter
• 2 Eggs
• 3/4 Cup Milk
• 1 Teaspoon Vanilla
• 1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon

The instruction portion of the recipe is mostly the same, except for the fact that we had to cook them for 15 minutes at 325 degrees F. instead of for 8 minutes. Also, although we only filled each hole to the half mark instead of the 2/3 mark, we had 24 donuts instead of 36. I don't know if the flour substitution made the difference or not, but they still tasted really good.

Simply blend all the dry ingredients and then add the liquid ingredients, mix well and then fill each pan hole to about halfway. Bake the donuts, checking them at 8 minutes and then again until they are done. Allow them to cool for a few minutes or they sort of come apart when you go to pop them out of the pan. Glaze or decorate them and then start chowing down.