Now that it’s almost time for Christmas (my absolute favorite time of year), I’ve started planning out all of my Christmas baking ideas, listening to Christmas music nonstop, and making these delicious Chocolate Candy Cane Donuts! This whole thing started with me having a box of mini candy canes and a want to bake something with them, as well as eat them. After a lot of google searches, I came across this recipe from The First Year blog (recipe link below) and let me tell you, they’re delicious and a great first Christmas baking recipe. Now onto the donuts!

Here’s the recipe that I used if you want to make these as well: Chocolate Candy Cane Donuts

Ingredients for the donuts:

Makes 6 regular sized donuts

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 6 tbsp milk
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla – the recipe originally calls for peppermint extract but I feel like that would be too much peppermint, especially with the candy canes on top, so that’s why I used vanilla instead.
• 3 tbsp canola oil
• 3 -4 candy canes, crushed

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees F and grease a donut pan with nonstick spray. Set the pan aside for now.

Now, in a large bowl combine flour, cocoa powder, sugar, and salt. Set this aside while you mix the wet ingredients.

In another bowl, whisk together the milk, egg, oil, and vanilla (or peppermint).

Then, add the wet into the dry and mix until everything is well combined.

Now it’s time to get this batter into the pan. You could just spoon the batter into each cavity, but I know from personal experience how messy that is so I decided on a neater technique, which worked just as well and I didn’t get batter everywhere. I got a batter dispenser tip a little while ago and now I finally have a chance to use it.

The little purple and white piece in the picture above is the batter dispenser tip and I used a piping bag with it, but a ziplock bag works just as well and you don’t have to use the tip either if you don’t have one, you can always just cut the corner of the bag and use it that way.  To use the batter dispenser tip, you just twist the two pieces apart and drop the top part into the piping bag. Using a pair of scissors, make a mark in the bag right above the first ring on the piece inside the bag, then slide the piece up the bag a little bit and fully cut the bag using your mark as a guide. Then slide the inside piece back down and attach the part with purple on the bottom, now you’re ready to fill your bag which i always find is easier and cleaner to do if you stand the bag up in a cup.  See the picture below.

 

Once your bag is filled with batter and ready to go, grab your pan and fill it up so it’s ready to bake.

When filling your pan, only fill each one 2/3 full, so that there’s room for the donuts to rise as they bake. See picture below. 

Bake these for 10-13 minutes or until a toothpick inserted and inch from the edge of the pan comes out clean.

Don’t they look delicious? Once they come out of the oven, let them cool for 10 minutes before taking them out of the pan and letting them cool completely on a wire rack.

As the donuts cool, it’s time to make a glaze.

Ingredients for the glaze:

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 3 tbsp milk
• a little splash of vanilla

To make the glaze, pour the milk and vanilla into the powdered sugar then whisk untl everything is smooth.

 

Now it’s time to crush the candy canes for on top of the donuts. All I did was unwrap my little candy canes and put them in a sandwich baggie, took my rolling pin and crushed them into little pieces. I had to put my crushed candy canes into a bowl because while crushing them, I put a hole in the bag and there was little pieces all over my counter.

Now, It’s time to glaze the donuts and top them with the candy cane pieces.

 To catch the drips as the glaze runs down the sides of the donuts, I put a silicone mat underneath my cooling rack. It’s so much easier to clean up the silicone mat after all the donuts have been glazed and dried, rather than the counter top. I did not enjoy that!

Dip the donuts into the glaze one by one, holding them upside for a few seconds to let the excess glaze drip back into the bowl. Then turn them right side up, place back on the rack and top all of them with the candy cane pieces. Let the glaze dry completely before handling them, unless you like glaze all over your fingers (nothing wrong with that.)

Don’t they look delicious? The combination of chocolate donuts and the candy canes is amazing together. Using vanilla in place of the peppermint extract, really makes the candy canes the star.

As always, if you make this or any of the other recipes on here, leave a picture in the comments so we all can see what you’ve made.

Until next time,

Peace, Love, and Sugar,

Brooke