Yeast Jelly Buns

Last week I decided to try a recipe by Jenny Jones (Jenny Can Cook). I chose that recipe because it was supposed to be a recipe for healthy Polish Pączki (donuts) version, and I did feel like having some fresh made pączki. Since the dough is not fried but baked instead (which sounded good to me because I dislike the frying part - so messy!), the donuts turned out to be more like regular yeast buns not real pączki. They tasted really good though and, all in all, I was (we were) really pleased with the results of my work.

My comments on making the donut-buns

The recipe calls for milk but on that day, I had run out of it. At first, I thought I would skip making pączki, but finally, I decided to use half and half instead. Actually, in recipes for 'real pączki' cream is often used.
I made the dough in a traditional way, by hand. I had to use much more flour than it was listed in the recipe (maybe half and half made the mixture wetter and more sticky) - about two cups altogether. After 20 - 25 minutes of kneading and spanking (meaning the dough of course), it was ready to be set aside.
I never use any baking paper so I greased the tin with some butter and floured it a little bit. It worked fine.
I stuffed the donuts with raspberry jam only, did not make the custard filling. Since I had never used 'the stuffing tool' before, I was not sure how much jam I was to squeeze into the buns. I did not want it to be that much as shown in the picture which illustrates the recipe by Jenny Jones. Later it appeared I could have pressed a bit more jam inside each of the donuts than I actually did.

One more thing: when a recipe is long, I usually happen to miss some part of it as (most often) I just scan the text while making the food item, looking for the key information such as eg. required temperature of the oven or time of baking. And I did miss the part on brushing the buns with melted butter. Nevertheless, instead of covering them with powdered sugar only (the buns seemed a bit dry indeed), I decided to glaze them with the thick icing made of powdered sugar and some hot water.

Summarizing the recipe experience: the buns/donuts were really enjoyable and not too sweet. Maybe next time when I am ready for some pączki again, I will brush them with butter too.

Recipe - print out version here.

Video by Jenny Jones