Manda's Smultringer or cake donuts Recipe
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Category: |
Category: |
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Ingredients: |
Ingredients: Cooking spray
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk
1/2 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Vegetable shortening, for frying
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Directions: |
Directions:Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Use a 3-inch-round cookie cutter or glass to trace 12 circles on the parchment, leaving space between each. Flip the parchment over and lightly coat with cooking spray. Fit a pastry bag with a 1/2-inch round tip or snip a 1/2-inch hole in one corner of a large resealable plastic bag.
Sift the flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt into a medium bowl. Beat the butter and sugar in a large bowl with a mixer on medium speed until well combined, about 2 minutes. Beat in the whole egg and yolk until incorporated and the mixture turns pale yellow, about 3 minutes. Beat in the milk and vanilla until smooth, scraping down the bowl as needed. Reduce the mixer speed to low; gradually beat in the flour mixture until just incorporated (do not overmix). Transfer the batter to the prepared pastry bag.
Using the circles as a guide, pipe the batter into 3-inch rings. (To make doughnut holes with the remaining batter, pipe 1-inch rounds onto the parchment.) Refrigerate while you heat the shortening, or cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
Heat about 6 cups shortening in a large pot over medium-high heat until a deep-fry thermometer registers 340 degrees F. (You want to have about 2 inches of liquid once the shortening melts.) Use scissors to cut the parchment around each doughnut, leaving a 1-inch border. Carefully invert 2 doughnuts into the shortening and peel off the parchment with tongs. Fry until golden brown, 1 minute 30 seconds per side. (Fry the doughnut holes 30 seconds per side.) Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Bring the shortening back to 340 degrees F and repeat with the remaining doughnuts. |
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Number Of
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Number Of
Servings:Yield: 12 doughnuts (plus about 6 doughnut holes) |
Preparation
Time: |
Preparation
Time:Prep: 40 min **Cook: 10 min**Total 50 min. |
Personal
Notes: |
Personal
Notes: Smultringer, (or lard rings in English), are a traditional donut that are very popular in Norway. They can be bought in packs at the supermarket throughout the year here, but come Christmas, you can buy them fresh and hot from street and market vendors. As such, they are not donuts to be iced, but a dusting of cinnamon-sugar makes them very moreish.
Smultringer is considered one of the seven Norwegian Christmas cookies (syv slag), with very interesting origins. Before smultringer, Norwegians were making similar-looking fried cakes called hjortetakk out of horn salt (ammonium bicarbonate) or what was earlier referred to as hjortetakksalt. It’s suspected that hjortetakk came to Norway from Germany, as there are German recipes for them tracing back to the 1700s.
The word smultringer seems to have first appeared in relation to a Norwegian who emigrated to America and returned to Norway in 1892. He began baking the cakes we refer to as smultringer (lard rings). It is unknown if he invented the word himself, but this is the first mention of smultringer as a name. What separated smultringer from hjortetakk in regard to the ingredients, was that smultringer was made with baking powder instead of horn salt. Today, however, smultringer recipes can be found using horn salt as well – perhaps a result of overlapping the recipes over the decades. The most apparent difference between hjortetakk and smultringer is in the consistency between the two. Hjortetakk is firmer and crispier, while smultringer is softer – the result of the batter having more liquid.
It took some time for the word smultringer to catch on in Norway. However, the influence of the American doughnut was becoming increasingly apparent. A Norwegian cookbook from 1888 provides several recipes for hjortetakk, with the last one being titled “Amerikansk Hjortetakk (Fry-Cakes)”. Other cookbooks appearing from the late 1920s and later on mention recipes called “donasser” and “donners”– Norwegian variants of the doughnut – showing that the American doughnut was gradually entering and being accepted into Norwegian baking.
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