I recently had some time at home due to quarantining, so I tested the Syrian Donuts recipe from Joanna Gaines's cookbook Magnolia Table. It was intended to be a challenge to myself, but it actually ended up being one of the most straight forward recipes I've ever tried, much like a lot of other recipes from this cookbook.
The steps following the proofing were a little more involved but were not extremely time consuming, and the reward was a delicious treat that is lightly sweet. They were much more dense than anticipated compared to a regular donut, more similar to the consistency of a very moist shortbread, and with a unique flavor that is hard to describe, but extremely delicious.
The yield for this recipe in the book is quite large at three dozen donuts and they only keep for two days before freezing. I figured we need not consume 36 donuts between the three of us in two days so I first did calculations to make a third of the quantity.
As I said, this was my first time using active dry yeast since the failed Christmas experiment (see previous post for Sirapslimpa here), so I was a little wary, but I believe it was more successful as it did not involve converting fresh yeast quantities and metric to imperial conversions. Once the liquid mixture was heated to the correct temperature, I only had to pour in the dry yeast and wait five minutes until it puffed up.
As the recipe states, this does form an extremely dense (brick like) dough, which has to be left to rise for two hours.
After two hours the dough looked like this, which was about doubled, though still very dense.
The next step was to form the actual donuts. The instructions state to form a six inch cigar first, which was a little difficult due to the dough constantly breaking up, but it eventually became easier.
There is no second rise required for these, they go straight into the oven after forming the donuts on the baking sheet. The recipe stated 12 to 17 minutes, or until the tops became brown. In my (gas) oven, it wasn't until at least 20 minutes they became even lightly golden on top.
This was not a major issue as the syrup/dip also took longer than anticipated due to me accidentally only halving the butter (instead of 1/3), so it would not turn clear. However, as soon as the donuts were out of the oven I dunked them into the syrup using tongs.
As the book recommended, I sampled the donuts while still warm. In fact, I had to try two of them before being certain of how delicious they were.
By the second day, once they cooled and the syrup/dip set, the taste did change slightly so the spices were more pronounced. I found I actually preferred them at room temperature as opposed to warm.
Overall, this recipe gets five out of five magnolia tables. I highly recommend it, and would try the increased amount of aniseed next time. If you'd like to try this recipe out for yourself, look to page 45 of Magnolia Table by Joanna Gaines.
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