How To Make Homemade Doughnuts

I’m going to show you how to make these beautiful little doughnuts, which are ridiculously easy to make and a great way to use up any extra cake batter you have! You’ll need a silicon doughnut mold, which you can find on Amazon, and you can make these with any butter-based cake batter, like my vanilla cake or chocolate cake. You can make a batch especially for these if you want to make quite a few or if you have a bit of batter left over after filling your cake pans, this it a fun way to use it up!

The easiest way to do this is to spoon your batter into a piping bag without a piping tip, just with the end of the bag cut out so there’s a hole. Squeeze the batter in a ring around the doughnut mold, making sure you don’t overfill the mold.

Every cake recipe is different as far as how much it rises, so for example my chocolate cake doesn’t rise as much as my vanilla cake so I can use more chocolate batter but know I need to be quite stingy with how much vanilla batter I pipe into the mold. I’ve overfilled the final doughnut to show you what happens… the batter will come up out of the mold when it bakes so instead of your doughnut being nice and rounded and it will overflow to make a big blob like a muffin top and can also close that signature hole in the middle of the doughnut.

Depending on your cake batter, you may or may not choose to grease the mold. My vanilla batter doesn’t stick to the mold so I don’t need to grease it and you can see how easily these came out of the mold.

My chocolate batter does stick, so if I don’t grease the mold, when I turn the doughnuts out they break apart like this.

If you spray cooking oil into the mold and then bake the doughnuts, they don’t stick to the pan but they come out of the oven with little holes, where the oil pooled in the mold. This will mostly be covered with a glaze so it doesn’t matter aesthetically but it can also create slightly darker, and slightly crispy doughnuts because the oil burns the edges of the donuts, and you can see that here: the darker doughnut on the left was cooked in a greased mold but the lighter doughnut on the right was not.

So if you need to grease the mold I recommend either rubbing the molds with just a little bit of butter or spraying them with oil and then using a paper towel to dab the mold gently to mop up any excess oil, and this is how the chocolate doughnuts baked when I did that.

The baking time for these will be a bit less than it would be for cupcakes, partly because of the hole in the middle so the cake part of the doughnuts is thinner than a cupcake, and partly because silicon heats up more quickly than a metal cupcake mold. You can tell when they’re ready because when you poke them gently, they should spring back.

Take the mold out of the oven, let it cool for about a minute to give the doughnuts a chance to set, and then flip the mold out over a cooling rack, peeling the mold carefully off the doughnuts to leave them behind as you lift the mold up. When the doughnuts are completely cool it’s time to decorate!

My favourite topping for these is chocolate ganache. I’ve shared my recipe for ganache here and also have a tutorial on 4 ways to use ganache. Pour your ganache into a bowl a bit bigger than your doughtnuts. Pick a doughnut up, flip it over, and dunk it in the ganache to cover it about halfway up. Flip it back over and leave it to set on the cooling rack.

Before they set you can add any sprinkles or other ingredients, but you have to be quick because once the ganache hardens any topping will bounce straight off.

You can use coloured ganache as well and I cover how to make dark chocolate and white chocolate ganache and how to colour it in my online course on 10 Cake Decorating Techniques.

For a candy melt ganache I’ve used a 4:1 ratio of 40g of candy melts and 10g of heavy whipping cream or double cream, microwaving it at 50% power for 2 minutes and stirring it until it’s smooth.

Now I’m pouring one color of ganache into the other, stirring it gently to mix them together just a little bit, and then dipping the doughnuts to cover half in the ganache, angling the doughnuts and re-dipping to get the coverage I want.

You can leave them like this or add some sprinkles before the ganache sets.

Instead of ganache you can make a glaze for your doughnuts, but this isn’t my favourite way of decorating them because glazes are very sweet and to get the right consistency to dip the doughnuts, the coverage isn’t as good as it is with ganache.

To make enough glaze for 6 doughnuts, sift 1 cup of powdered sugar into a bowl and whisk in 2 tablespoons of whole or full fat milk. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla and pour it into a wide, shallow bowl. Dip your doughnuts and you can spoon more glaze onto them to get better coverage.

You can add colour to your glaze, either mixing completely or just stirring slightly to marble the colours together, and then dip the doughnuts or spoon the glaze over the top.

You can add toppings like Oreo crumbs, sliced almonds, sprinkles, or whatever you like! Store the doughnuts in an airtight container for a day or two or decorate a cake with them!

If you prefer to watch the video of this tutorial you can do that here: