Food: Timing is Everything, Part 1

It turns out, you can’t just come home one night and make doughnuts. Perhaps if I had read Joanne Chang’s Flour Cookbook recipe for Vanilla Cream Filled Doughnuts before starting to make them, I would have realized this. But of course, I did not. So instead of sitting down to type up the recap of this experience after it’s all over, I’m going to do this in real time.

Tuesday, January 4th – 8:34pm:

I bought all of the ingredients for these doughnuts as I left work today, and then proceeded to take an infuriating trip to Target, during which I lost my list of Things I Needed to Buy at Target. By the time I got home I was in a pretty serious mood, and I was almost annoyed that my plan tonight was to make doughnuts. I really just wanted to sit down and drink a few glasses of wine.

But no, I pressed on. While I hadn’t read the details of the recipe the night before, I had scanned it closely enough to know I needed to make some pastry cream first, so I began with that. The cream was easy to make and I was feeling pretty damn good about myself until I read that I would need to cool it for “at least 4 hours.” At this point I thought “Seriously? I’m not going to be eating these doughnuts until 10pm?” (Wrong.)

With the cream (minus several liberal spoonfuls to my mouth) in the fridge, I began work on the doughnut dough. I have to admit, I was a little thrilled to be able to use a different attachment for my hand mixer for the first time- the dough hooks.

dough hooks

But my excitement soon dissipated as my dough began to form a nice round ball and I got to this directive in the recipe:

“Remove the dough from the bowl, wrap tightly in plastic, and refrigerate for at least 6 hours or up to 15 hours.”

Not only had plastic wrap been one of the forgotten items on my lost List of Things I Needed to Buy at Target, it now sunk in that I wasn’t eating these doughnuts at all tonight.

You’ll never guess what the next step is. But I’ll tell you around 6am tomorrow morning. Stay tuned.

dough ball, now chilling.