beds, books and donuts

Today’s recipe (and book suggestion) was originally published by Pamela of Prettydreamer on “Wither Will I Wander”.

While under the weather, sick in bed for three weeks (that is, almost the whole month of April) … there was definitely time to read a lot in bed.

Homer Price by Robert McCloskey had it’s chance for a second time around read. This time read by my child who could mostly read this sweet book herself.

Homer Price contains a series of lovely short stories about life for a young boy from the town of Centerburg. The cast of characters includes: a pet skunk, the string savers club, sandwich advertising man, a comic book super hero, a tinkerer and a hermit inventor and the not to be missed latest, modern “time -saving” machines. Like many of McClosky’s books, “Centerburg Tales” shares
that sweet, slow moving time that children live into.

Now about those donuts ….

Having no new-fangled, modern machinery at my disposal and not wanting to fry donuts in a quart of oil …. I came across this wonderful recipe for baked donuts.

They were very tasty and an important way to end reading about “the donuts”.

“Homer pressed the button marked ‘stop’ and there was a little click, but nothing happened . The rings of batter kept right on dropping…gadgets kept right on turning them over…”

Ingredients

• 7/8 cup Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 large eggs
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons buttermilk or yogurt

Directions 1- Whisk together all of the dry ingredients in a medium-sized mixing bowl. 2- In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, oil and buttermilk or yogurt until foamy. 3- Pour the liquid ingredients all at once into the dry ingredients and stir just until combined. 4- Butter or grease the doughnut pan; non-stick pan spray works well here. Note: even though the pan is non-stick, since the doughnuts are low-fat they may stick unless you grease the pan first. 5- Fill each doughnut form half full. 6 – Bake the doughnuts in a preheated 375°F oven for 10 to 12 minutes. When done, they’ll spring back when touched lightly, and will be quite brown on the top. 7- Remove the doughnuts from the oven, remove them from the pan, and allow them to cool on rack. If desired, glaze with icing, or dust with cinnamon-sugar or any non-melting sugar. This recipe is originally from the King Arthur Flour website.