Chocolate Donuts With Gooey Glossy Salted Caramel

Welcome to day 2 of donut week! I present to you... Chocolate Donuts With Gooey Glossy Salted Caramel! I cannot express how much I am enjoying myself, all I've eaten today is donuts donuts donuts! I shall not tell you what sort as that will spoil tomorrow's installment! The fantastic thing about baked donuts is that I can scoff scoff scoff until the cows come home and not feel an ounce of guilt - now THAT is what I like in a baked good.

These donuts are not quite as easy to eat several in a row of like a well tuned robot as yesterday's Vanilla Bean Baked Donuts With Raspberry Icing were as the cocoa powder makes them heavier, but who cares right they're chocolate mmmmmm... and still only contain 10g of butter.

I have never tried salted caramel before (I know I know how disgraceful) as I have always been a great believer in added salt in anything being a hugely unnecessary hypertension inducing no-no. HOWEVER, for salted caramel I fully, wholeheartedly retract that statement. Since baked donuts are new to me I thought why not try something else new? I did not regret it Salted caramel is fabulous, that combination of sweet and salty... oh my tastebuds, they do NOT know what is happening but oh my, they like it, they like it a lot.

I will stop harping on about salted caramel now as I am probably the only person in the baking blog writer/reader community to have not tried it. I was foolish.

I don't have a pan of good enough quality to just heat sugar like I've seen in other recipes (all my pans are scratched and so the coating comes off), so I melted the butter and sugar together (I used a combination of granulated and light brown) with 25 g of golden syrup for a richer flavour.

The yoghurt in this recipe makes the chocolate donuts sticky and gooey and moist and melt-in-the-mouth delicious-y. I used low fat Greek style yoghurt but vanilla would be nice too - maybe even more so! Would ya just look at the crumb...

Ingredients

(same as yesterday, this recipe makes 4 crazy big, 5 optimum or 6 if scrimping)

For the chocolate donut:

70 g self-raising flour
25 g cocoa (I used Bournville 100% cocoa solids)
60 g granulated sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
50 g yoghurt
20 ml milk (I used semi-skimmed)
1/4 tsp vanilla bean paste
10 g unsalted butter, melted
1 medium free-range egg

For the Salted Caramel sauce:

35 g unsalted butter
50 g sugar (I used half granulated and half light brown)
25 g golden syrup (if you don't have this increase the sugar to 75 g)
50 ml double cream (I used Elmlea's alternative to cream because it lasts longer)
1/2 tsp sea salt (not table salt!!!)

Directions

1. Pre heat oven to 170 degrees C. In one mixing bowl combine self-raising flour, cocoa, sugar and baking powder and mix well. In another bowl combine yoghurt, milk, vanilla bean paste, butter, egg and mix together well. Mixing dry and wet ingredients well separately ensures the ingredients are well mixed and distributed evenly in the batter and removes the need to mix extensively when you combine the two thus ensuring you don't over work the gluten in the flour.
2. Tip the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and mix together just until all is incorporated.
3. Transfer the mixture into a piping bag and pipe the batter into your donut pan. (This step made the very immature part of my brain chuckle please comment with 'chuckling' if you have a go and see why!)

4. I filled my pans right to the top. This mixture is thicker than yesterday's and so it held its shape rather than over flowing down the hole! So feel free to fill your pans right up!
5. Bake for 12 - 15 minutes (I baked mine for bang on 14 minutes). Since the donuts are chocolate it is more difficult to tell when these ones are done so start checking at about 10 minutes, when the cocktail stick comes out clean they are done! Be careful not to over bake or you will end up with dry donuts instead of nice moist gooey ones mmmmm. As I mentioned yesterday I have mini Savarin pans rather than a donut tin (baker problems of the UK) which explains why the top half and bottom half of my donuts are rather different!

6. To make the salted caramel sauce firstly combine the butter, sugar and golden syrup and melt over a medium heat stirring the whole time. Bring it to the boil and simmer for a further 4 - 5 minutes stirring every so often.

7. Take the pan off the heat and add the double cream and the salt. If your sauce isn't thick enough put it back on a medium heat and stir. Remember though, it will thicken as it cools.
8. Once your donuts are completely cool palette knife or drizzle (drizzling is much harder than it looks if you want to make it pretty so I gave up and palette knifed!) a generous, thick layer of salted caramel on to them letting it drizzle down the sides a bit.

9. You will have more salted caramel sauce than you need so take spoon, put salted caramel on spoon, put spoon in mouth mmmmmmmmmmm.
10. Leave the salted caramel to cool and set, serve, eat and ENJOY :)

It is best to store these doughnuts in the fridge as cream is used.

If you missed yesterday's Vanilla Bean Baked Donuts With Raspberry Icing this is what they looked like, see the recipe here!