Recipe Monday - Can You Guess What These Are?

I can already hear you. What, you are asking, in the everloving world are those? It's a valid question. Some people thought sausage, to be honest. But you all couldn't be more wrong.

These.

These are donut holes.

And not only are they donut holes, but they are donut holes made in a maker machine specifically for donut holes. You'd think even I couldn't fail. But you'd be wrong.

There's the recipe for those of you who actually want it. My favorite part is at the very bottom. "Use your imagination and have fun!"

What? Oh, I had to use my imagination alright, but I really didn't have all that much fun.

It started out simple. Gather the ingredients. There weren't even that many! (Check it: super dangerous knife and water bottle atop the microwave...where the five year olds can't get them.)

But before we even began, I had a Facebook freakout about the buttermilk. In fairness, I don't often (read this was the second time ever) use buttermilk, and that shit stank. Holy God, it smelled so rough. Not to mention it was separated. As in, it was all watery up top, then turned into sour-creamy like goo at the bottom, and...no. Just no. So I asked about it very calmly on Facebook. Something like, Omg, has anyone ever used buttermilk? I feel like I'm going to kill us all, HALP! You know, a normal, intelligent FB update.

I was informed that the stankier the buttermilk was, the better. Um, okay. I'd just let the kids eat theirs first and watch what happened.

So, I began mixing. All I had to do was put the right amount of all the ingredients in one bowl and stir it. What could possibly go wrong? I only had one step.

Did you know that there is a difference between a one-cup wet ingredient measuring tool and a one-cup dry ingredient measuring tool? I didn't.

Okay, so that looks good, right? Like dough should look. And since these are "dough" nuts, I should be set. But this was supposed to look like batter. Wat? What do?

Apparently, I'd measured the dry ingredients in my wet cups and the wet ingredients in my dry cups, and seriously why are there so many cups?

Facebook helped me figure that out, but unlike usual, they had no solution. Just start over, they said. But I was out of stank-ass buttermilk. We were foraging on.

So, I just altered the directions a tad. Instead of "pouring the batter" into the little donut hole maker thing, I "scooped the dough" into it. I'm sure it's fine.

Well, almost fine. No one will notice that these are as heavy as bowling balls, I'm sure, and once I put the cinnamon sugar on there, no one will even see...any of all that up there.

Except another problem awaited me. The instructions stopped after the wonderous dough balls were completed. They gave no indication of how to get the cinnamon sugar on the holes! Facebook to the rescue again!

Just put cinnamon and sugar in a ziplock bag and shake the balls around in it, they said. It will work, they said.

That is a donut hole with only cinnamon on it. There was sugar in the bag. I swear. But sugar apparently hates donut holes and only the cinnamon came on board. If you're wondering, it tasted just like you would think a donut hole covered in plain cinnamon would taste. Blech. Clearly I needed another solution.

But not, of course, until trying that same bag thing over and over and over again. You know, just in case the sugar wanted to get in on this donut-hole action. (Spoiler: It never did. And now I had a dozen just cinnamon holes.)

Someone finally suggested putting a little, tiny bit of water on the baked goods, to get the sugar to stick. Now, that sounded like a bad idea to me because you can't just put water on bread-like things, amirite? But I was out of options, so I tried it.

And it worked. Thank the lord.

And for the week after that we had the densest, heaviest, hardest-to-eat donut holes ever.

Yum.