“Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnuts, the pessimist the hole.” – Oscar Wilde

Why we have to talk about doughnuts? Why not? One of my happy memories when I was growing up in Bali was when I was eating doughnut. And I know there are many of us that have a fond memory eating their favorite doughnut when they were growing up. Mine was the giant one with chocolate sprinkles at the street corner on our way home from Church on Sunday morning. For some reason, my taste buds as a child can tell the difference between my favorite doughnut, and the others doughnut…

I was not serious into baking until about 5 years ago, then I found out about potato doughnuts. What? I thought potato is for dinner… Well, it turn out this potato doughnuts are yummy scrumpulicious if there is such a word, maybe for the next dictionary new word.

The most important topic in potato doughnuts is potatoes! I experience with regular sweet potatoes, the popular orange color one that you always find in every grocery store, Idaho potatoes, and the Japanese purple sweet potatoes. For this recipe I will use the purple Japanese sweet potatoes, which I will boiled, mashed and let it cool.

Let’s get started!

Gather all the ingredients: blooming yeast (have you read my quarantine pizza?), mashed sweet potatoes, sugar, salt, egg yolks.

Mix all the ingredients together, knead it, shape it into a round ball, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, damp towel on top, let it rest inside warmed (not hot!) oven until it’s double in size.

• 

• 

Once the dough rise, punch the dough ball in the middle.

Divide the dough in 50 gram ball shaped, mine is a mini doughnuts, so it’s smaller than 50 gram. Rest these balls of dough again for 20 minutes or until they are double in size.

• 

• 

While waiting for this second rise, prepare your frying pan with light olive oil. Make sure that the oil is deep enough for deep frying and wait until it reached the temperature of 350 – 375⁰ Fahrenheit for a perfectly cooked doughnuts. I also prepare a baking sheet pan with paper towel to drain the doughnuts.

Once the 20 minutes up, now it’s time to shape the balls. Make a hole inside each balls, shape the ball accordingly to your preference, you can even shape it in alphabetical shape for your name initial just for fun! In this recipe I shape it as a mini doughnuts.

Drop 3 or 4 doughnuts inside the hot frying pan with oil. You can drop more than 4, it depends on the size of your pan, just want to make sure that you have enough room to flip each doughnut. I use chopstick to flip the doughnut, based on my doughnut making experience, the chopstick is the best tool to flip a frying doughnut. Deep fry until both sides become golden brown color.

Once all your doughnuts are deep fried and drained, melt semisweet chocolate on a double boiler style. Since I don’t have a double boiler, I just make my own by boiling a little of water in a small pot and ceramic bowl on top, be careful to not burnt your finger, always use a mitten or towel in holding the ceramic bowl.

• 

• 

For decorating these undressed mini doughnuts, I prepared 2 sheets of aluminum foil as my decorating base, because at the end, I will just crumple the foil and all the crumbles and sprinkles are all there inside the foil. There you go! I just gave you a secret of cleaning fast after decorating doughnuts.

• 

• 

What else to do after kneading, rising, frying and decorating doughnuts? Eating it 3 at the time with coffee, hot chocolate or tea, whatever your preference, because life is good when you enjoy it!

• 

• 

---

Potatoes Doughnuts Recipe

---

500 gram organic all purpose flour
11 gram instant yeast
200 gram organic Japanese purple sweet potatoes
100 gram organic pure cane sugar
75 gram grass fed butter
½ teaspoon salt
4 organic egg yolks
100 ml. lukewarm (110⁰ F) water