Strawberry and Chocolate Donuts

Chocolate coated yeast donuts with strawberry glaze, in the back is chocolate with chocolate sprinkles

I have a dear friend that is home sick with high fever for the past few days.  She's just starting to recover a bit and I wanted to bring her something sweet and fun and comforting -- so I decided to make donuts.

After playing with Barbara Elsi's sourdough donuts last week, I learned a lot about the texture and donut shaping process.  So this time, I was able to keep them closer to their proper shape.  Also, I pan fried Barbara's recipe.  With this recipe, I deep fried them as traditional donuts.  

I took Jenny McCoy's donut course on Craftsy and made the yeasted dough recipes in the course materials with four changes: a) I used Earth Balance buttery sticks instead of butter; b) I used almond milk instead of whole milk; c) I used SAF Gold yeast; and d) I used lilac scented sugar that I made last month when the lilac flowers were in bloom.  

The yeasted dough went CRAZY while fermenting.  It started just below 1 quart and rose about a quart every 15 minutes - ending at around 4 quarts before I rolled out my dough.  

They only needed about 10 minutes to proof before going into the oil.  I heated my oil too hot at first so the first few were really dark.  But once I got the oil back down to 350F, things went much smoother. 

For the Jelly - I had actually made strawberry jam that I had canned earlier in the week, so I just used that jam.

Filling the donuts was interesting.  First, I tried using my filling tip without a coupler in the piping bag.  That was a mistake.  Jelly went everywhere.  So, after setting up bag #2, I used a coupler and I tied the back of the bag so the jelly could only go where I wanted it to.  

For the toppings - I made four of them:

• I made the chocolate glaze using Valhrona 66% semisweet chocolate with an Earth Balance buttery stick a vanilla simple syrup. 
  
• I pulsed some local fresh strawberries with 10x sugar to make a strawberry glaze.   This proved to be a little tricky because the strawberries were so juicy that I needed to keep adding sugar to the blender (much more than I expected it to take).
  
• I rolled 1/2 the donut holes in some cinnamon sugar
  
• I rolled the other 1/2 of the donut holes in the strawberry glaze and then rolled them in granulated sugar
  

I cut most of the donuts into squares for jelly donuts but I made 40% of the dough into ring donuts.  

I topped some of them in just chocolate; some in chocolate with strawberry glaze drizzled over them,  and some with chocolate and chocolate sprinkles.