Cherry Chip No-Fry (Baked) Cake Donuts

    Let's skip straight to the point, okay? These donuts are 100% cake. They're round like donuts, but they *are*, in fact, cake. Okay, we've got that out of the way. :) Other blogs gush about how lovely it is to have donuts that you've baked without the mess and impact of frying. I get it. Truly, I do. I didn't want to eat grease. (I can't handle it anymore.) I didn't want to work with grease. But I am not going to lie to you and say that these are 'cake donuts'. They're not. They're round, holey, little cakes. Okay? Shew! Fortunately, my kids are good with that. ;)

Let's also get the recipe out of the way up top. Too few recipe pages do that. Here goes:

1 Box Cake Mix (your choice)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk
1 egg

Simple! I have perused cake mix donut recipes for about a week now, in anticipation of making these. They are all nearly identical. If I had to split them into two camps, it would be "more milk, fewer eggs" and "more eggs, less milk". I opted to slide right down the middle of the recipes and made them as listed above. I baked them for 14 minutes in silicone donut pans at 350 degrees. 

It is important to spray the pan before you add the dough. I scraped the batch into a gallon-sized zipper bag, snipped the corner off, and pressed out the batter in a circle around the ring. You can see below that around half of the donut was plenty. They plumped right up to the proper size.

It is also notable that you need to let these babies cool for around ten minutes after baking, so they come out of the pan more easily. You can also loosen them up with the handle end of a spoon if you feel you need to. 

These little cakes were very good, if somewhat fragile. In the end, rather than refilling the three fun donut trays, I popped the rest of the dough into cupcake wrappers and baked them up as-is. You get more "inside" in one bite this way. The inside is my favorite part. :) I also filled six of them with chocolate icing and then frosted the tops. My girls at them so quickly I don't have a picture. Hubs and I prefer without. All in all, doing these with my kids was 'memories in the bank' enjoyable: a real bonus in our day. <3 

Should you choose to make these, know that they will be fun and flavorful whether you consider them to be true cake donuts or not. There is still a recipe floating around out there that I would like to try. It calls for substituting other wet ingredients with applesauce, pumpkin puree, or smashed banana. The pictures on that recipe certainly looked more like cake donuts do inside. We shall see!