Adventures in Cast Iron Donuts

It was all supposed to be so easy….just heat up some oil in the cast iron skillet and make delicious donuts. This is the story of an “Adventure in Cast Iron Donuts”. This is a story of failure. The donuts you see in the photo were inedible, and they were the only four halfway presentable products of my cast iron donut experiment. I had been really excited for this baking project, ever since I’d read Elena Rosemund-Hoerr’s book The Southern Cast Iron Cookbook, and saw her recipe for Apple Cider Donuts.

With the weather hopefully turning toward Fall soon, I could almost taste the apple cider goodness. Sadly, it was not to be. Something on my part went very wrong- I’m assuming I just couldn’t get the amount of oil to temperature equation quite right, but it was a full-on disaster. Most of the first batch of donuts were totally blackened and charred, and when I finally did get to the end of my dough to where I was getting a nice crisp outer edge of donut, the inside was almost completely unbaked dough = gross. The glaze did make it look a little better, I have to say. But no one will be eating these.

This put me in an interesting frame of mind, because I had to revisit my feelings around failure. It’s almost easier for me to fail at something I’m completely new to- I sort of expect failure the first time. (I should realistically expect it the first ten times, but I’ll admit I start to get frustrated with myself if I’m not succeeding by the third try). But I wasn’t counting on failure with this recipe. I know how to bake, and for some things I’m actually a pretty good baker. Sure I was introducing a new element, and I worked carefully, but I still failed utterly. And I felt really discouraged, even to the point of wondering whether I should even bother with this cast iron donuts thing again in the future. After all, we have a perfectly good donut shop in town that will happily sell apple spice donuts much more cheaply than my little experiment costs. But here’s the rub- I really want to learn for myself how to be a good cast iron cook/baker. And you don’t learn anything by giving up after one try. So I will dust off the powdered sugar and start examining where I went wrong with these. And after a few technique tweaks and crowdsourcing recommendations for the best oil and temps, etc., I might make donuts somebody actually wants to eat. In the meantime, the birds will feast (full disclosure: turns out that the birds don’t seem to want them either!! :)