How To Make Homemade Doughnuts
How about if I told you that you could make these Homemade Doughnuts real quick, serving them warm and golden to your family, with no knowledge whatsoever of yeast or dough, no special equipment other than what you likely have on hand, and have them done start to finish in under ten minutes, including prep time?
Here’s How To Make Donuts at Home… You’re Welcome 🙂
We Southerners (and humans in general), love our doughnuts.
The most important thing about this doughnut making recipe though is that you begin with CANNED BISCUITS. No, they do NOT taste anything like a biscuit when you are done. They taste every bit as melt in your mouth good as they look!
Recipe Ingredients:
- Vegetable oil
- Canned biscuits for the doughnuts
- Butter
- Cinnamon
- And sugar for the coating.
TIP: For the biscuits, any style at all will do, just don’t get the flaky layers because they will absorb the oil whereas normal biscuits won’t if we get our oil hot enough before frying them.
- In a bowl, stir together cinnamon and sugar and set that aside.
- Melt a stick of butter in another bowl and set aside as well. Now they will both be handy as soon as the doughnuts are done.
Making the doughnut hole
Now you can go buy a doughnut cutter or some other fancy finagled device (which I actually have tucked away in the dark recesses of my kitchen drawers) but I like to show y’all how to do things the simple way. I’m a big fan of not over complicating a simple matter. For that very reason, we are going to just use a plain old 20 oz bottle cap to cut the centers of our doughnuts out.
- Cut out the holes in every doughnut, reserving them to cook along with the doughnuts.
- Voila, our doughnuts are done.
Pour your oil in a skillet. You need a little less than a half inch.
Heat your oil on medium to medium high for several minutes. We want it to be hot so that our doughnuts are instantly seared when they enter it. This prevents them from absorbing too much of the oil and being soggy. However, we don’t want it too hot so that the outside gets done before the inside.
TIP: To test my oil, I put a doughnut hole in it. It should sizzle and bubble around the edges and then you know its hot enough. You may need to turn your heat down a bit after testing it with some doughnut holes to see if it is just right. Once the doughnut hole is golden, remove it and let it cool a minute before taking a bite to make sure it’s fully cooked, not gooey, in the center.
Time to cook the doughnuts!
TIP: If your skillet isn’t big enough you may have to do them in batches. By the time you have put them all in, some may already be ready to turn. It takes less than a minute for them to be ready to turn over.
This is how they look, nice and golden.
- Turn them all over and let them cook until the undersides are this way. All in all, this should take less than two minutes.
- Remove cooked doughnuts from oil and place on paper towel lined plate or a drying rack if you’re feeling fancy.
- Now do the same thing with the doughnut holes.
- Here are our cooked doughnuts, now let’s add a little bit of heaven to them!
- The doughnuts should have cooled just enough so that you can handle them but they will still be very warm.
- Pick each one up and dip both sides in melted butter…
- Then press them down into the cinnamon sugar on both sides.
- Repeat with all doughnuts and doughnut holes.
- Eat them warm. They will positively melt in your mouth, they are so good!
No one will believe you started out with canned biscuits so lets just keep that little tidbit to ourselves 😉
Doughnuts in minutes! What a fun breakfast or evening treat when family is visiting!
Ingredients
- 1 large can Grands style biscuits or your preference, just not flaky layers
- 1 Cup Sugar
- 1 1/2 Tablespoons cinnamon
- 1 stick butter melted
- Vegetable Oil For Frying
Instructions
- Pour oil into skillet to the depth of a little less than 1/2 an inch and heat on medium to medium high for about five minutes. In a bowl, melt butter. In a separate bowl, combine cinnamon and sugar.
- Using a plastic bottle cap, cut the center out of each biscuit. Drop dough into hot oil, watching carefully and turning when golden. Once doughnuts are golden on both sides, remove to paper towel lined plate. Repeat until all dough is cooked, including doughnut holes.
- Dip both sides of each doughnut into melted butter, then press both sides into cinnamon sugar mixture. Serve warm.
Nutrition
You may also like these recipes:
Quick and Easy Jelly Filled Doughnuts
Biscuit Pretzels – AMAZING Pretzels From Canned Biscuits!
How fun! I grew up on these and this “recipe” was the first I ever tried at around age 10! (where was my mother letting me do this with hot oil??!!). I haven’t used the butter method, but we always took a paper lunch sack and put the sugar and/or sugar-cinnamon mixture in there. Shake, shake, shake and the hot donuts are done! I’ve also used powdered sugar but my favorite will always be plain old granulated sugar…..
xxoo
I made these last Saturday night for my 2 kids. They were a big hit! Great Big HIT !!! IAnd of course, since I wanted to make these as cinnamon/sugar donuts, I didn’t have any sugar in the house AT ALL! Can you believe it? So, in the cupboard I went to rummaging. Found a can of vanilla frosting in there. Voila! we had frosted donuts! Gonna make them again & use chocolate & strawberry frosting for the kids on this coming Saturday morning. The only thing that will make them even better than the vanilla ones, is some ice cold milk to go with them. Thanks so much for sharing this recipe with us. I never would have thought of that.
My mom made biscuit donuts all the time when I was a kid! you can dust them with powdered sugar when still hot and the heat melts the sugar into a pseudo-glaze.
My favorite when I was a kid (although I’m sure I’d be ill now) was what we called dubloons. Flatten the biscuit, but don’t cut it, put small pile of chocolate chips in the center and fold over and seal well. Fry and then cover in powdered sugar. OMG!
I tryed making these tonight with pillsbury buttermilk biscuits and mine did not cook right. I was wondering where did I go wrong. When I got finished and took a bite I realized that it browned the outsides but the insides were still pure dough?? Please help! because I love doughnuts! =)
Hi Madison! I make these all the time, and thanks Christy for the tutorial. I stumbled across it by accident as I had several cans of biscuits about to expire, and my twins loved donuts.
It sounds like you may have had the oil too hot for your doughnuts. The outside cooked to fast so they appeared done, while the inside did not. You can test the oil with a small cube of bread. If it takes less than 30 sec to turn brown, the heat is too high. I hope this helps!
I find it a bit different the size of the biscuits as well like the jumbo biscuits if you use them cook slower than the normal small biscuits
I made these tonight and I had to share how it went…..
I was a little hesitant (I don’t know WHY I even doubted you;), to make these since they are made with biscuit dough, but the hubby wanted something sweet-so I thought I would give it a try. He is not a huge cinnamon sugar fan , so I made half with the sugar mix, and half with chocolate icing. OH WOW!! I brought the plate into the living room, hubby took a bite, his eyes were huge and he said “Are these very expensive to make?! If not- we should never buy doughnuts again!!” Let me just tell you-that is a HUGE compliment:) Thank you for such a wonderful yet easy recipe.
We made these this morning and I was amazed! Normally I’m very suspicious of something that is claims to be super easy and delicious but these were wonderful! I found dipping them in butter after frying was a little too much for our taste, so directly after frying I dusted them with powdered sugar or dipped them in cinnamon sugar. Delicious! I used a candy thermometer in the oil and 275 seemed to be the temperature I could get them cooked in the middle with out burning the outside…..
My mom made these when I was little but used a mixture of powdered sugar and milk for icing. Can also use orange juice instead of milk for a different taste. Wish my kids were home today…..guess what we would have for breakfast!