Missing a World of Chocolate Sprinkled Donuts

It's Sunday which in pre-covid times meant getting ready, going to church, and chocolate donuts after. The boys would each get a donut and we would sit in a cafe with a bunch of other church family. My kids liked to eat the icing off first and then consume the rest of the donut leaving very messy faces and hands to wipe up. Afterwards the boys run outside to play along the hillside. I'd look forward to the familiar faces I'd see, the occasional bulletproof coffee I'd treat myself to, and the reality that Sundays most of the time brought a slower schedule.

Oh, how I'd love to go back to the days of chocolate donuts after church. I'm not sure which stage you're at in grieving this new normal, but something that's helping me right now is getting specific about naming what those things are. Today, it's chocolate sprinkled donuts.

Well, can you imagine the excitement when I told the boys we were making them at home?! I'd go so far as to say I prefer these over chocolate birthday cake and as I'm writing this I'm wondering if we should make them again today. We do have chocolate birthday cake in our house though, so these may need to wait a week.

Anderson has become my helper in the kitchen and so the day we made these was no different. He loves making recipes our own. He's always up for trying new ingredients although sometimes I do have to stop him from getting carried away. I was probably the one who needed stopping on these guys though since we ended up drizzling chocolate over the top later on that day!

If you're missing Sunday donuts too, why not make them at home? I hope you have what you need and if not, try for next week. We haven't made donuts since Anderson was 3 and at that time tried several from Joy the Baker. This is based off of her chocolate donuts though we made them our own using the flours we have on hand, the lack of buttermilk, and adding cinnamon of course. We ran out of cocoa powder so I've been using a big bag of cacao powder for some time now. It works great! We needed to make quite a few donuts too and this recipe yielded us about 16 donuts!

Ingredients You'll Need for the Cinnamon Chocolate Donuts

• donut pans- this recipe made 16-18 donuts

• 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour

• 1/2 cup cacao powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 1 cup packed brown sugar

• 1 cup milk

• 1 3/4 teaspoons cream of tartar

• 2 eggs

• 1 stick (8 T) unsalted butter, melted

• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

• 2 teaspoons vanilla

Ingredients for the Glaze

• 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar

• 3 tablespoons cacao powder

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

• 4 tablespoons milk

• Sprinkles!

1. Preheat your oven to 325 and spray your donut tins with cooking spray!

2. First off, melt your butter so that it can begin to cool. Next mix together the milk and cream of tartar.

3. Mix together the dry ingredients, flour, cacao powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and brown sugar.

4. In a separate bowl mix together the milk and cream of tartar, butter, and vanilla.

5. Combine the wet and dry ingredients then pour the batter into the donut pans and bake for 11-13 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Don't overfill the pans as you could result in full pans and no donut hole!

6. Allow to rest for 5 minutes before inverting onto a wire rack to cool.  While cooling make the glaze by mixing the powdered sugar, cacao powder, cinnamon, vanilla, then 4 tablespoons of milk.  

7. Dip the cooled donuts then sprinkle them, allow to cool so the glaze hardens some, and enjoy!