Making doughnuts

I booked myself on to a doughnut making class. It's not the first time I've put myself in the hands of a professional to learn how to bake something. The last one was croissants, and it was a fantastic experience (read elsewhere in the blog) and I've made them twice since, both times a total disaster. Evidently the only way to make the perfect croissant, I concluded, was to do it in a professional kitchen with proving larders (not drawers - whole ROOMS), and massive ovens set to exactly the right temperature, and huge butchers' blocks with vats of flour. So when I decided I wanted to learn how to make doughnuts, I figured this would be one fabulous afternoon making the perfect puffballs of sugary fabulousness, once and once only. I wasn't even going to try fantasising about making these at home.

So I turned up, and we put on white aprons with our names written on in black marker (presumably washable) and within seconds we were elbow deep in doughnut dough, scraping and kneading. Probably the stickiest dough I've ever dealt with. Kneading this stuff reminded me of detention at secondary school when I had to scrape chewing gum off the underside of the girls' toilets. And then it disappeared into the proving boudoir and then we took out another set of dough that had been made earlier because doughnut dough needs an overnighter to reach the perfect consistency and they didn't have beds in the cookery school. And we rolled out the pre prepared dough and made 10 balls and I found I was so excited about the prospect of 10 doughballs turning into doughnuts that my hands were shaking. Or maybe my blood sugar was low. We had to pair up to fry our proved doughballs, which by the time they came out of the proving mansion, were like beautifully crafted domes, surprisingly robust on the outside, fragilely light on the inside. We used professional fryers (you see?? Who has one of those in their homes??) and heatproof thermometers (nope, I don't have one of those either. One more in a series of reasons why I would never make it to the qualifying round of the Great British Bake Off) and then we took them out of the friers carefully with slotted spoons and plonked them straight into sugar. And quite frankly I could have eaten all ten right there and then, straight out of the sugar bucket. But this was a cookery school, not a corner shop doughnut pop up, and we were going to inject these suckers with filling. A creme pat (nobody who counts themselves as a serious baker would give this its full name...), made by the vat, and OMG it was another struggle not to dive straight into it. And we took syringes and injected it into each of the doughnuts and I had one of those sitcom moments where I attempted to inject as much creme pat into each doughnut as I could without them bursting their sides and of course two of them burst their sides. And we still weren't finished. We went off to another kitchen and learned how to make honeycomb, and my two attempts were horrendous - big lumps of the stuff that wouldn't crumble, but it was DELICIOUS, so I just chucked it into the crevices between the doughnuts, to the shocked derision of my perfectionist co-bakers. And then I put them carefully, cracked honeycomb and all, into a cake box and brought them home. I took a picture of the unctuous, gooey, riotous mess that they were (come on - homemade custard filled doughnuts on the TUBE? During RUSH HOUR? The only way to get them home in one shape would have been to have hired a private jet and had them couriered). And we ate them. And I've never made them since. It doesn't matter. I had the most brilliant doughnut baking afternoon.