Saturday mornings are for donuts! Growing up, whenever my friend and I had a sleep over, her dad would take us through the car wash and then we’d pick up donuts afterward for Saturday morning breakfast. It was such a fun tradition, I was sad when I realized it would be hard to continue for my own kids when we discovered our son’s food allergies. To be honest, it’s hard realizing he may never get to experience most of my favorite foods or treats that I love. That’s why I’m on a mission to find all kinds of amazing foods he can try – wether it’s a treat that’s just naturally allergen friendly, or a traditionally non-allergen friendly treat that we are able to imitate in flavor and texture.
Recently my son got a book about numbers and one of the pages has little donuts on it. He asked what they were and then kept asking every day if he could have a donut. I promised him I’d find a special donut recipe just for him that we could make at home so we knew it would be safe! My husband also loved to buy donuts as a special treat but he hasn’t gotten to eat them since he began having issues with gluten. I decided it was time I bought a donut pan and hunted for a good recipe.
The one I settled on is a cake donut recipe, and it is so yummy! My plan is to experiment with it a bit until I can make a really good dairy free chocolate cake donut with a really good chocolate fudge frosting. I would also love to try some fried donuts sometime, but that gets tricky when you’re dealing with gluten free flour.
What Makes This Recipe So Great
- Egg, Dairy, & Gluten Free: It can be hard to take the traditional ingredients out of a beloved recipe, but these still turned out amazing!
- So Fun & Easy to Make: Donuts sounded a bit daunting to me, but with the right recipe and a donut pan, they turn out great and are a fun activity with your kids especially. Add some color to the glaze, or decorate the top with fun sprinkles!
- It’s Delicious: The donuts have a great flavor and texture to them, and they don’t feel like a “substitute” at all.
- Quick: These donuts only take 10 minutes to bake and are ready in no time!
Ingredients & How to Substitute
- Dairy-Free Milk – I like soy milk, but I know being a top allergen, a lot of people can’t do soy, so pick your favorite plant based milk you have on hand. I always recommend either rice or soy milk in baking, as I’ve found they work the best, but others probably would work well too.
- Apple Cider Vinegar – You need an acidic ingredient to make the buttermilk. If you don’t have apple cider vinegar, you can use white vinegar or even lemon juice.
- Gluten-Free Flour – I like to use a good 1:1 replacement gluten-free rice flour blend in my recipes. You can probably use a gluten-free oat flour instead, or if you don’t have problems with wheat, you could use a wheat flour.
- Brown Sugar – I actually like to go with unrefined sugars as much as possible and usually use coconut sugar.
- Baking Powder – This helps your donut get fluffy while baking.
- Salt – This will help add and enhance the flavor of your donuts.
- Applesauce – Applesauce is a common egg replacement in baking, it also adds some sweetness to the donuts.
- Vegan Butter – I love the flavor of normal butter, so I like to use butter replacements that taste the same. If you don’t have any vegan butter on hand you can use a mild tasting oil like avocado oil or vegetable oil. If you can do dairy, normal butter is also fine.
- Vanilla Extract – Vanilla is so good in baking, definitely don’t skip this ingredient!
- Confectioners Sugar – I mentioned I like using unrefined sugars, but for glaze and frosting it’s a lot harder to do, so I just use normal powdered sugar.
Some Recipe Tips
This batter is super thick, in order to get it into the donut pan, I found putting it into a piping bag or even a plastic baggy with the corner cut off to pipe it into the pan works really well. The donuts are best fresh. I don’t recommend trying to keep them longer than a day, they don’t seem to last well.
Glaze
Here’s an example of how the glaze turns out if you use 2 whole cups of sugar. The other images of the donuts show how they turned out with a much runnier glaze consistency. Both were delicious, it just depends on what look you’re going for, or if you like a thicker glaze or not.
Homemade Donuts
Ingredients
Donuts
- 1/2 cup dairy free milk
- 1/2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 1 cup gluten free flour
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp apple sauce
- 2 tbsp vegan butter
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Glaze
- 2 tbsp dairy free milk
- A pinch of salt
- 2 tbsp vegan butter
- 1-2 cups confectioners' sugar
Instructions
Donuts
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and grease your donut pan.
- In a medium sized bowl, combine the dairy free milk & apple cider vinegar. Let sit for 5-10 minutes to form buttermilk.
- Add all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl and mix to combine.
- Once buttermilk is ready, mix all the wet ingredients in with the buttermilk, then add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and stir together well.
- Add the batter to your pan, it is pretty thick, so I found piping it in worked best.
- Bake for 10 minutes.
Glaze
- While the donuts cook, make your glaze.
- Whisk melted vegan butter, dairy free milk, and salt together.
- Add in powdered sugar a little at a time while whisking until a smooth glaze forms. Depending on how thick you want it will determine how much sugar you add.
- You can also add a few drops of food coloring if you want some color. Mine are pink because I made these for valentines day.
- Let your donuts cool completely before dipping in the glaze and adding sprinkles on top.
