Yeast Doughnuts with Homemade Strawberry Jam 🍓

June 10, 2018

June at last – summer at last! And for me June always smells of strawberries..😊🍓Strawberries in my mum's garden, strawberries in my grandmother's yard, and finally strawberries at the farmers' stalls dotted all over town, which are simply impossible to walk past! I didn't walk past today either, and as always, overestimating my capacity, I bought more of the good stuff than I can possibly eat. So I had to rack my brains for what I could do with strawberries that were counting down their final hours.

Yeast Doughnuts with Homemade Strawberry Jam

Jam, of course, is the best way out! But where am I going to put it? The freezer barely shuts as it is.. hmmm… where could I use up that much jam? 🤔

And, oh gods, a brilliant idea struck me! Yeast doughnuts with strawberry jam!!!🍩🍓 just one small problem… if the word „yeast” appears in a list of ingredients, there is a 99% chance it will not work out for me. To this day I have never managed to make friends with yeast – it never rises the way it should and never foams the way it foams for everyone else (perhaps the yeast gods have cursed me?). 😁 aaanyway, the day always comes when you have to go „one on one” with your fears, and today that day dawned. My fiancé philosophised that yeast is like a plant (??😂) – if you talk to it, encourage it and praise it, it will rise. So that is what I did: fingers crossed for half a day, every now and then I would open the fridge door and have a word with the dough. 🤣🤣 And it rose! Not just rose, but rose beautifully!

Yeast Doughnuts with Homemade Strawberry Jam

And now about the doughnuts. This recipe made 12 of them, and about a cup of jam or a little more. When you fill the doughnuts, don't be stingy with the jam; there will be plenty and you may even have some left over. The flavour – 10/10, you could eat yourself sick. 😁 if, like me, you adore the doughnuts sold in bakeries and shops, this recipe is exactly for you, because these are all but identical – and the cost is laughable.😊 if you can't get through them all in a day, put them in an airtight plastic bag so they don't dry out. They are also very good warmed up. If the doughnuts have been sitting a while, warming them makes them soft again in an instant, as though freshly fried. 🍩

Okay, I won't waste any more of your precious time – the recipe is below👇, grab your whisks and off to the kitchen!💪

Yeast Doughnuts with Homemade Strawberry Jam

Ingredients

4 cups fresh strawberries
1 ⁄3 cup sugar
lime juice (I used the juice of about 1 lime)

For the doughnut dough

3 ⁄4 cup full-fat milk (3.5%)
2 large eggs + 2 egg yolks
vanilla paste (optional, to taste)
85 g room-temperature butter
3 1 ⁄2 cup flour + extra (if needed)
1 ⁄4 cup sugar
1 tbsp dried yeast
half a tsp of salt

Other

Vegetable oil for frying the doughnuts
icing sugar
piping bag

Instructions

Make the jam (you can do this the evening before and keep it in the fridge overnight). Quarter the strawberries and put them in a pan with the sugar and lime juice. Stirring constantly and crushing the strawberries, cook over medium heat until the liquid has evaporated and the jam has thickened (10-20 minutes, depending on how watery the strawberries are). Leave to cool completely.
For the dough, bring the milk to the boil over medium heat — don't let it boil over! Pour the boiled milk back into the measuring cup; if you see there is less than 3⁄4 cup left, top it up with water to reach 3⁄4. Let the milk cool to about 40 degrees (it should be warm, not hot). Add the eggs and yolks to the milk and mix well (if you are using vanilla, add it now).
In a large bowl, mix the sifted flour, sugar, yeast and salt with a wooden spoon. Pour in the milk and egg mixture and stir (don't overmix; the ingredients just need to come together). Fit the dough hooks to your mixer and knead for about 3 minutes on low speed. Alternatively you can do this by hand on a lightly floured worktop (knead for about 6 minutes). The dough should be a little sticky, but not too much — if it needs more flour, add some.
Add the butter — a piece at a time as you knead, not all at once. At first it may look as though the butter refuses to combine with the dough, but don't worry, keep kneading. Once the butter has come together with the dough, knead for a few minutes more on medium speed (a little longer by hand) until the dough is smooth and elastic. Put the dough into a generously floured bowl, cover it with cling film and refrigerate for a minimum of 3 hours and a maximum of 12.
Line two baking trays with baking paper and dust them generously with flour. Roll the dough out to about 1.2cm thick. Stamp out rounds with a round cookie cutter (mine is about 7.5cm across — it gave 12 doughnuts). Carefully transfer the doughnuts to the trays and cover them very loosely with cling film (otherwise the rising doughnuts will stick to it). Leave them somewhere warm to prove (1-1.5 hours was enough for me).
Heat a pan of oil and set a few plates lined with paper towels next to it. Carefully move each doughnut onto a flat surface you can slide it into the oil from, because picking them up by hand will ruin their shape (I moved mine from the tray into the oil with a wide plastic spatula, dusted with flour so the dough wouldn't stick). Doughnuts fry very quickly, so pay attention. When one side starts to brown, flip them over. Once fried, transfer them onto the paper towels.
Once the doughnuts have cooled, make a deep hole with a wooden skewer and fill it with the strawberry jam (I used a piping bag for this). Dust with icing sugar.

Notes

Adapted from lovecommacake