It’s Party Time Again! (an excuse for tea and …donuts?)

Two more birthdays – both little girls – call for another tea party.  With our recent move away from wheat and generally reducing grain intake, scones were out until I can op-test a few grain-free versions, and donuts were in, since I’ve already mastered several delicious variations.

I have been gone from the bloggy world for seemingly forever: there has been SO MUCH GOING ON (isn’t summer always like that?) that my break from blogging has seemed like an ending rather than a pause.  After much reflection, though, I have decided to continue on, but with a few changes.  For the most part I will try to keep my posts shorter, and I am only shooting for one post a week.  I need to set limits for myself so that I don’t end up blogging until 3am.  I mean, naturally, staying up that late should only be reserved for things absolutely necessary to my life, like cooking for guests actually arriving the next day or enjoying myself thoroughly somewhere with my favorite people (movie on the couch? dancing in the streets?)  This means it may take me several days to finish anything, but since it’s still not yet one in the morning, I may at least begin this post. 🙂 [Disclaimer – I started this post ten days ago!! But “summer” is over for real now, so perhaps things will finally settle down, no?]

Bunting in place…All ready for the tea party to start

someone’s keeping a close eye on the donuts!

she keeps following the donuts around…

 

So without further ado – my entry into a contest on the WonderMill website.  It was for baking something without wheat using the WonderMill, which is a wheat grinder.  Thankfully, it also grinds beans, corn, and some other random grains, so I’m keeping it around.  For this recipe, I ground up a batch of dried garbanzo beans and went to town to create an original ALMOND JOY DONUT.

Almond Joy Donut: Wheat-Free, Grain-Free, Dairy-Free

A few hints here and there to friends (and their questioning remarks) have led me to realize that our family can’t just go from grinding, soaking, and baking wheat into the most delicious creations to… completely avoiding wheat and reducing grain use in general, without a few words on the blog. The blog will need a bit of…revising…now that we have become convinced we shouldn’t be eating modern wheat.  More on that on another day (soon I promise!) but for now I will keep to the point: a CHALLENGE from the WonderMill Company, in which we are to post our best non-wheat recipe made using a WonderMill.  So – here’s my attempt, followed by a brief summary of the donut day we had for the tea party:

ALMOND JOY DONUTS

(wheat-free, gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free, Paleo)

DONUTS:

4 eggs

5 Tbsp honey

3 Tbsp coconut milk

1/4 cup coconut oil (liquified)

4 tsp coconut butter

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp almond extract

1/4 cup ground flaxseeds

1/2 cup garbanzo bean flour

1/4 cup almond flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup xylitol

ICING:

1/2 cup coconut milk (canned, unsweetened, full-fat)
1/3 cup coconut palm sugar (adds a bit more coconut flavor – but you can use an alternative sweetener if desired, such as more xylitol or honey.)
4 tbsp coconut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup shredded coconut

 

TOPPINGS:

Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips (or regular dark chocolate chips if you’re not Paleo, or your own “melted chocolate” (make the chocolate by melting 2 T. coconut oil, then add 1/4 cup cocoa powder, 1 Tbsp honey, 1/2 tsp vanilla, and stir until smooth)), and some slivered almonds.

[A recipe for coconut butter can be found HERE on  Mark’s Daily Apple.  I assume you can also buy it somewhere, but I’ve never looked.  It’s essentially coconut ground up in a Vitamix until it turns into a thick butter.   If you used straight coconut, almost no amount of grinding in the blender would cause it to become smooth once it’s in the batter, and you’d end up with tiny chunks of coconut in your donut and frosting.]

DIRECTIONS

FOR THE FROSTING: Mix all ingredients except the coconut together in a blender (incorporating coconut butter by hand can be difficult), transfer to a bowl, and stir in 1/4 cup shredded coconut.  Refrigerate.

FOR THE DONUTS: IN A BLENDER,  mix the eggs, coconut milk, oil, and honey for about 30 seconds until a bit frothy.  Add the rest of the liquid ingredients and mix another 20 seconds.  Add the dry ingredients and mix for another 30 seconds, making sure to scrape down the sides to incorporate all the ingredients.  You can use a grain mill to grind the dry garbanzo beans or a high-speed blender (I tested this in the Vitamix as well, but the flour is nowhere near as fine.)  Some recipes allow grinding the flax, almond, beans, etc, in the Vitamix along with your liquids — in other words, not turning them into flour first.  I may attempt this next time so I can report on the results, but the whole point of this recipe was to use my grain mill for the beans. 🙂

Grease the donut pan (or donut maker – you have to figure out cooking time for one of those on your own: 6-8 minutes?), and load up the little donuts all the way.  You can pipe it out of a ziploc bag, attempt to pour it out of the blender, or scoop it out with a spoon.  [Quite honestly, I can’t remember the consistency of this batter, because yesterday and today, I made FIVE MORE GRAIN-FREE DONUT RECIPES taken from around the web.  They are all blending together (pun intended) in my satiated donut-fueled brain. ]  Bake at 350 degrees for 16-18 minutes.

ASSEMBLING:  Once the donuts have cooled, dip them into the melted chocolate.  Set aside for the chocolate to harden.  Load up the coconut frosting into a sandwich baggie, and cut off the corner.  Use this device to “pipe” coconut frosting all over those bad boys.  Top with slivered almonds.

baking ’em up

YUMMY!

Now that you’ve witnessed cake donut HEAVEN (note – true donut heaven can only be found in the company of FRIED donuts – not baked, cake donuts – in my mind), please join me for a trip to cake donut PARADISE where we have sojourned for the past few weeks since our transition to wheat-less living:

Donuts as far as the eye can see

SAMOA DONUTS    Cooked up a batch of these babies the same day I created the Almond Joy Donuts (just in case my donuts turned out to be gross.)

(The pictures on the girl’s actual blog post are far superior to mine, but we didn’t care what they looked like, since they tasted AMAZING.)

VANILLA DONUTS (NUT-FREE) WITH CHOCOLATE AND CARAMEL TOPPING

That link takes you to “Caramel Glazed Donuts,” but I was making these for someone who couldn’t have nuts, so I didn’t use her caramel glaze. These are essentially vanilla-flavored donuts, and I topped ours in melted store-bought caramels (It was Liesl’s birthday, and I knew the regular caramels were safe for the nut-free guest.) as well as a bit of melted chocolate.

The vanilla-flavored, caramel and chocolate-topped, nut-free/grain-free donuts

Quick. Close up on the chocolate…

CARAMEL APPLE DONUTS

Tasty, but the next time I will experiment with my own version of this recipe in order to make it more apple-y.

Caramel Apple donuts. Don’t look very caramel-covered. Better luck next time…

BAKED MAPLE DONUTS (NUT-FREE) WITH MAPLE FROSTING

These were delicious, but I sort of created a Maple Syrup frosting for the tops instead of the glaze.  Need to work on this myself in the future to make a maple donut that truly looks like the ones from Dunkin (you know, that frosting that stays put?)

Maple with maple frosting

yummmmmmaple

I did, however, use the “maple glaze” from her recipe on our next donuts…

PUMPKIN SPICE DONUTS

These were MY FAVORITE DONUTS of the day, hands down.  Loved them with the maple glaze as well.  Topped them later on (the few big ones I made for the adults’ breakfast tomorrow) with some of my Maple Syrup frosting, too, and now they will produce a nice sugar buzz in the morning….(oops)

Scrumptious Pumpkin – good thing they look so unassuming so the kids left more for me!!

and…last, but certainly not least…

GERMAN CHOCOLATE DONUTS

This link pulls up “Almond Joy Baked Donuts” which is a very different recipe from mine for Almond Joy Donuts.  I made sure to check the web for any other donuts “like mine” before creating the contest recipe, so that I wouldn’t be “stealing” someone else’s recipe.  Hers are chocolate donuts with a chocolate glaze topped with shredded coconut and almonds.  Mine, however (as you will have noticed), are almond/coconut donuts, with a chocolate glaze and coconut frosting, topped with slivered almonds.  Either way, I digress, because today I made a NEW CREATION using her chocolate donuts as the base, and Samoa Donut girl’s coconut caramel as the topping, since it had reminded me of German Chocolate Cake frosting last time I made the donuts.

“German Chocolate” goodness

That coconut caramel was, indeed, stirred for 45-60 minutes by my crew – Claire, Greer, and Liesl

 

– and to quote my mixing bowl from the UK – “Let Them Eat Cake!” (er…donuts!)

Kitchen fairy Claire

Birthday girl Liesl

Birthday girl Greer, deep in contemplation

The boys had some gun action, dropped in for donuts, then went back to horsing around.

Our tea party