Baked Donuts

Ever since seeing the sweet potato donuts on the cover of Food & Wine, I've been wanting to try to make baked donuts. But as I started looking, the reviews for those sweet potato donuts said they were a little tough. I could imagine the sweet potato making them a little heavy, so I started looking for alternates, and settled on this recipe from 101 cookbooks.














The dough came together easily, and the rolling and cutting was quick, too. I made do with a canning ring and a 1M piping tip since I didn't have a set of round cutters. These worked pretty well!

In the end, the kids loved these. They were pretty good, but they were definitely rolls with icing. The donuts themselves were too big for one person to finish, and really it's the icing that carries the roll. The donut holes were the perfect proportion of icing to roll. We'll be making those again!

Bread and Butter Pickles

For the last year I've been looking forward to making my own pickles. So at the farmers market this past week, I got 7 lb of pickling cucumbers for $5. The $5 is incredible to me, and it reassures me when I look out at the backyard garden and see the deer lounging :)

As I looked more closely at the recipes I'd marked, I realized 7lb makes a lot of pickles. I ended up scaling down a couple of dill ones from the Ball book, and then found Simply Recipe's bread and butter pickles, which used 2 1/2 pounds and was perfect to use up the remaining cukes.

The bread and butter are the pretty ones on the left. They're great pickles. They're not too sweet and have a little bite, I think from the pepper. My husband, who does not like bread and butter pickles, loved these and ate most of a pint the first night. I may have underestimated how many I should have made!

Pineapple Paletas

Going along with our fun with ice pops, we tried these pineapple paletas. The recipe made them seem a little futzy with the pureeing and straining, but it actually was all pretty quick. And really none of the steps required any special attention or skill, so they were easy to throw together. And, I really liked these! They're sweet and acidic, very bright, and perfect for a hot day!