Biscoff Cream Doughnuts with Salted Honeycomb
Fluffy, pillowy doughnuts filled with a rich, biscoff cream custard and topped with salted honeycomb for extra crunch!
Ingredients
For the doughnuts
- 500 g strong white bread flour
- 60 g caster sugar
- 10 g fine sea salt
- 7 g easy bake yeast I like Allinson's
- 4 large free-range eggs
- 1 lemon zested (you'll only need 1/2 of the zest)
- 150 ml water
- 125 g unsalted butter softened
- 2 L sunflower oil for frying
- caster sugar for rolling
For the filling
- 1 vanilla pod split and scraped
- 50 g light brown sugar
- 75 g dark brown sugar
- 500 ml full-fat milk
- 4 egg yolks Clarence Court sell these cartonned
- 80 g plain flour
- 200 ml double cream
- 125 g Lotus Biscoff spread
For the honeycomb
- 40 g clear honey
- 70 ml liquid glucose Sous Chef sell this!
- 200 g caster sugar
- 2.5 tbsp water
- 1 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
Instructions
To make the honeycomb
- Line a large baking tray with parchment paper.
- Sift your bicarbonate of soda into a small bowl so it’s ready to go.
- Put the honey, glucose, sugar and water into a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves and isn’t so grainy anymore. This should take a few minutes.
- Reduce the heat and leave to simmer for 10-12 minutes until your sugar syrup turns a beautiful light brown caramel colour.
- Turn off the heat and whisk in the sifted bicarbonate of sofa for about 5 seconds. Be careful as it’ll fizz and bubble up straight away.
- Pour evenly onto your prepared baking ray and leave to cool completely.
- Once hardened and cold to the touch, bash with a rolling pin to break up into small pieces and sprinkle some Maldon sea salt flakes into the mix.
To make the doughnuts
- You need to leave the dough overnight in the fridge, so bear this in mind when planning your bake ahead of time.
- Put all the ingredients apart from the butter into the bowl of an electric mixer {you can use a hand-held whisk with dough beaters but you may need to keep an eye on your motor as it could overheat}. Mix on a medium speed for about 8 minutes until the dough starts to come away from the sides of the bowl and form a ball.
- Turn off the mixer and let it rest for a minute or two.
- Start it up again on a medium speed and slowly add the butter in small 25g additions. Once all the butter is incorporated, mix on high speed for about 5 minutes until the dough is glossy, smooth and elastic.
- Cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave to prove until the dough has doubled in size.
- Knock back the dough by punching all the air out, then recover and put in the fridge to chill overnight.
- The next day, take your dough out of the fridge first thing in the morning. Cut your dough into 50g pieces then roll into smooth, taut balls and place them on a floured baking tray, with plenty of room in between each ball to allow for them to rise.
- Cover with clingfilm and leave to prove again for about 4 hours, until they’ve doubled in size.
- Pour some caster sugar into a bowl ready to toss your fried doughnuts in.
- You can either use a deep fat fryer {if you have one}, or I use a heavy-based saucepan, filling it up halfway with sunflower oil.N.B. Please be very careful here as hot oil will cause serious burns.
- Use a sugar thermometer clipped to the side of the saucepan to heat the oil to 180C.
- When the oil is ready, slide a slotted spoon or frying spatula underneath a doughnut being careful not to deflate it and slide them carefully into the oil.
- You should be able to fry 2-3 doughnuts at a time but don’t overcrowd the saucepan with too many at a time. Fry for 2 minutes on each side until golden brown. They’ll puff up and float, so you may need to gently push them down to help the colour evenly.
- Remove from the oil and place immediately onto kitchen paper to soak up a little of the excess oil, then into a bowl of caster sugar for tossing while they’re still warm.
- Repeat until all your doughnuts are fried, but remember to check your sugar thermometer to check it’s still 180C before adding more to your saucepan. This will avoid your doughnuts being raw in the middle, or burnt on the outside.
- Set aside to cool before filling.
To make the filling
- Put the vanilla beans, scraped from their pod in a saucepan with the milk and bring slowly to the boil.
- As soon as it starts to bubble, remove from the heat.
- Whisk the egg yolks and sugars in a bowl, then sift in the flour and mix again.
- Add the Lotus Biscoff spread to the milk, whisking in so it melts and combines completely. The mixture will thicken but keep whisking so you don’t have any lumps.
- Pour the just-boiling milk mixture over the yolk mixture, whisking constantly to prevent the mixture curdling. Return to the pan and cook over a medium heat for 4-5 minutes until it’s nice and thick – you want it to hold it’s shape a little.
- Pass the mixture through a sieve into a fresh bowl to get rid of any potential lumps, place a sheet of clingfilm on the surface to prevent a skin forming, leave to cool and then refrigerate.
- Whip the cream using an electric whisk with an additional 2tbsp caster sugar {or if you have it, vanilla sugar} until soft peaks form. Fold into the chilled custard.
To fill your doughnuts
- Make a hole in each doughnut {anywhere around the white line} using the end of spoon or a chopstick.
- Fill a piping bag with the Biscoff cream and pipe into your doughnuts until swollen and plump.
- Finish with a good chunk of salted honeycomb and devour straight away.N.B. If you don’t eat them the same day, you can keep them in an airtight container and reheat them slightly in the oven or microwave {on low for 30 seconds} to refresh them a bit.
Notes
Sous Chef is great for hard-to-find ingredients like glucose
Clarence Court sell cartonned egg yolks (so you avoid having to separate eggs yourself, and wasting the whites!)