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| Beignets and cafe au lait. A little bit of the Crescent City in my kitchen |
New Orleans is my favorite city to visit in the US, and one of my favorite parts of those visits is making a few trips to Cafe du Monde at the French Market, usually in the small hours of the morning. There is nothing better than these powdered sugar covered grease grenades to soak up a night's worth of alcohol, and they're delicious too. (Chicago folks: I've only been served beignets once in Chicago. They came with the coffee I ordered at Big Jones, and they were awesome.)
I started out with this recipe, which was excellent. I also had some apple cider sitting around. Green City Market has a booth that sometimes serves apple cider doughnut holes, and I thought that it would work well in the beignets. I substituted cider for all the water called for in the recipe and cut the sugar back to 1/4 cup. The next time I do this recipe, I'm probably going to either boil the cider down by half to concentrate the flavor or (more likely) use apple juice concentrate. I also might try substituting buttermilk for the evaporated milk to counter the sweetness of the ton of powdered sugar you pile on these things.
The recipe calls for chilling the dough for a half hour, and I left it in the fridge overnight. The recipe definitely didn't suffer for the extra time.
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| Cutting out the dough |
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| Into the fry daddy. Three fit well, but I had enough room to do 4 at once |
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| I pulled them when they were this dark. It happens quickly |
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| Covered in cinnamon powdered sugar, ready to serve |
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I loved this recipe. I'm convinced that, without the modifications I made, they'd be really similar to the ones I love from Cafe du Monde, but I'm looking forward to playing around with the basic recipe more in the future. Besides, there's skim milk in that cafe au lait, so these are healthy, right?
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