Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Fat Tuesday!






In honor of Grandma, the kids and I baked fastnachts (donuts) today. It's tradition in our family to eat them (as well as raise cakes, which I didn't bake) the day before Lent. I pulled out her recipe this morning, and realized it called for 11 cups of flour!!! I quickly halved the recipe and still ended up with more than we could ever eat, as you can see.


I used the bread machine to do the kneading, then left the dough to rise. Grandma's instructions say to let it rise for four hours OR overnight. Well, I didn't start early enough, so they rose for about 2 hours before we cut them into donut shapes. We then let those rise for over 3 hours.


Somehow I ended up with Grandma's deep frier (credit that to my mom, who saves everything!) I plugged it in and got ready to fry up these donuts. All of a sudden, however, a strange odor penetrated the room. I looked over and saw the frier was SMOKING!! I could smell burning plastic - I discovered that smell earlier this week when I placed my plastic mug on the burner - so I quickly unplugged it and went to "plan B." All of the oil was poured into my regular frying pan, and I used my oven thermometer to get it to 375 degrees.
We ended up with a TON of delicious donuts. My favorite way to enjoy them is to coat them in confectioner's sugar, but we also served them with cinnamon sugar, karo syrup, and jelly. I lost count of how many the boys (and I) had. It is Fat Tuesday, after all.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great photos Karen and what a fantastic way to celebrate your Grandma too. I am sure she is proud. Boy those look yummy.

love
Liesl and Jodie :)

Anonymous said...

Mmmmmmm yummy. I totally forgot about Fastnachts until you reminded me in your email. I didn't realize fat Tuesday was so close. So we ended up missing it this year. We thought about making them this weekend, but it seemed silly not to make them at the right time. Here is a post from last year and pictures of our bounty.

Anonymous said...

Where's the link? Here it is:
http://www.geokaz.com/archives/000757.html