Over the past week, I’ve been swiping bananas from work without any agenda and ended up stockpiling four pretty ripe bananas, which led to the question: “What can I make with this that’s not banana bread?” For whatever reason, my answer to that was: brioche donuts with banana/vanilla pastry cream. I ended up using a combination of two recipes to pull this off: this one and this one. The banana pastry cream would be made by adding mashed banana to the pastry cream, which I have made before.

Brioche Donuts

So I’ve worked with brioche before so I didn’t feel too bad going into this. The dough came together easily. From comparing between the two recipes, I went with the less complicated ingredient list but tweaked the amount of flour, after finding the dough pretty wet when it came together. I started with 500 g of flour, but slowly added close to 50 g more. I added 1 stick of cubed butter and left the mixture to knead on medium speed on my standmixer for the next 30 minutes, learning from my previous experience of kneading dough for cinnamon rolls. This time, the dough was very tacky and elastic, passing the windowpane test. After adding a couple more tbsp of flour after seeing how sticky this dough was and kneading it into the dough, I let it rest for the first rise for about 1.5 hours. This dough ended up doubling in size. I then stuck the dough for the second overnight rise in the fridge.

The next day, I noticed that the bowl I chose was a bit small since the dough continued to rise overnight in the fridge and was threatening to reach the top of the bowl. I was very glad for the pictures from Baran Bakery‘s recipe blog for a visual check of where I should be. Pouring the dough out onto a flour surface, I then split the dough into two and rolled it into two logs and split it into 6 pieces each with a bench scraper. The recipe said to split it in 16-20 pieces but…well, I have 12 pieces.

After kneading and doing my best to shape each piece into a ball (some more flour required), I left it to rest for 45 minutes. Horchata Latte‘s recipe called for a 4 hour rest but I noticed that the dough balls seemed to expand to double the size in about 2.5 hours. This is where I realized that I should’ve made smaller pieces because I was about to have some huge brioche donuts.

It was time to fry some donuts.

I decided to try two methods of frying–deep-frying and air-frying.

Deep-frying

Using a (potentially broken) candy thermometer, I heated up about 1.5-2 inches of vegetable oil on a pot on the stove to ~350F. I fried two donuts at a time, ferrying the balls of dough on a floured bench scraper.

The first time I tried to transfer a donut, I actually dropped it on the way over so its shape was slightly off–an action that I would have to pay the consequences for when the shape was not completely fat to fry evenly, leading to a very oddly shaped donut, browned more in some parts than others. Eventually, I went the route of flipping the balls of dough into the pot of oil, since that seemed to preserve the integrity of the circular dough ball shape more than sliding and misshaping the dough off the scraper and into the oil.

I fried each donut side for about 1.5 minutes before flipping it over and repeating the same for the other side or when it reached a nice golden brown color. This is where I noticed that how tightly I shaped the dough into balls matter where some donuts took upon interesting shapes as they fried as air bubbles developed inside and expanded as the dough was heated in the oil, stretching the dough and turning it into a different less disc-like shape. When done properly, both sides of the donut would be golden brown with a pale white line separating the two sides.

This is also where it became very apparent to me of why the recipe said to cut it into 16-20 pieces, these donuts were so dang big upon frying.

They were so big. Some were as big as my hand.

I then transferred the donuts to a cooling rack for a 1-2 minutes before rolling it in cinnamon sugar. I learned that I could not transfer the donuts directly into the sugar because it was so hot that it could melt the sugar.

This process was fairly straightforward and posed very little issues. The only drawback was maintaining the temperature consistently at ~360F, it was often easy for the temperature to fall dramatically between batches, which led to me waiting for a couple of minutes for the thermometer to climb back to 360F after dropping to sub-300F temperatures and toggling with the heat power of the stove.

Air-frying

So I have very little experience working with an airfryer but Baran Bakery mentioned that the recipe was possible to execute by air frying, something that did pique my interest. Especially as I live with more health-conscious people in my life, air frying seemed to be the healthier alternative that wouldn’t scare people away from donuts as much as deep frying seemed to do. I took half of the batch of donuts and placed them in batches of two, making sure to spray the inside surface of the air fryer with avocado oil spray, and cooking them at 350F for ~5 minutes, without turning the donut over halfway.

What came out of the air-fryer was a drier (less greasy looking) looking donut, with no characteristic white line around the middle. It looked browner in some spots in comparison to others. Checking the bottom of the donut revealed indentations from the air fryer rack itself. After brushing the donut with some leftover oil, I rolled those donuts too in cinnamon sugar.

Appearance-wise, it didn’t look as pretty as the deep-fried donuts but there was definitely less hassle and guesswork with keeping a consistent frying temperature, in comparison to the other method.

Banana/Vanilla Pastry Cream

Before the second rise of the donuts, I prepared my fillings–the classic/reliable vanilla pastry cream I’ve made in the past for cream puffs and fruit tarts and a banana variation of that, using one of my overripe bananas. This process was pretty straightforward and came together in about 10-15 minutes. I then split the vanilla pastry cream into two aliquots, one for the classic and one for adding banana and seeing what happens The first thing I noticed was that .adding mashed banana thinned the original pastry cream, making the filling a bit runny. It tasted very pleasantly banana with a hint of vanilla.

So something I realized that I should’ve considered was using a pastry tip to deposit the filling. I was too lazy to go fetch a proper pastry bag and elected to use a Ziploc instead and I paid the consequences of that when I realized that I cut a piping hole that was slightly too big to fit in the opening that I carve out in the donuts. After awkwardly maneuvering the Ziploc bag tip to fit in the donut holes, I started piping, piping half with vanilla and the other half with banana cream.

This is where I realized another potential hiccup was the fact that brioche, unlike cream puffs, are not hollow. There was not going to just be an empty cavity for me to fill with cream, which I would later realize when I broke open one of the donuts to inspect the inside. The filling would only reach to maybe 1/4th of the way down into the donut. So, there would only be cream in the first bite but bread the rest of the way down. What I should have done in hindsight was to carve out a bigger hole in the donuts and insert the piping tip deep into the donut, piping from the bottom and fill to the top to ensure a more thorough filling.

Overall

Anyway, moving onto the taste.

One thing that I noticed was that there was very little difference in taste between deep-fried and air-fried donuts, maybe to the pleasant surprise of some more health conscious people. If I ever decide to make this in the future, I’m glad that the air-fryer poses a possible option. It also seems less of a hassle to deal with since it could maintain its own temperature consistently. Considering just the brioche, the brioche tased very buttery and was pretty soft. With it being rolled in cinnamon sugar, it’s a no brainer that it would taste pretty good. I like the contrast of the colder pastry cream paired with the warmer donut, which miraculously didn’t melt completely when piped in. Because of the issues I had with piping the donuts properly, I ended up eating these donuts by dipping it in the excess amount of pastry cream leftover before popping it in my mouth. Nevertheless, they were good.

Making brioche donuts had been on my bucket list for awhile and I’m glad that I was finally able to tackle it. Would I make it again? Uhh…it was a bit of a process and from living with people who are leery of eating deep-fried sweets, so probably not.