The Lab (featuring Mini Vegan Apple Cider Donuts)

Heavy-duty steel wire racks displayed harnesses of all kinds– leather and vinyl, with mouth cages and bits, extra-large and teensy-weensy. There were collars too, baskets of them on the showroom floor—utilitarian, leathery and studded, pink and frilly. Feathery poofs on the ends of thin plastic wands leaned out of bins on the floor and long mylar leashes hung from an a-frame rack.

My heart was not racing, I was not short of breath. I immediately felt I could be myself here.

This pet store (oh, you were thinking it was something else?) was about to celebrate its 20^th anniversary and needed a caterer to provide a sumptuous array of small food.

Amid a truly grim month in Wonderland, I was having a great day. I had slept well, booked a job, and successfully made a dessert on TV. Walking into this shop was the icing on my frostingless cake.

I stood solidly in my burgundy Chucks, my mini Toile De Jouy dress, and a very pilling vintage sky blue cardigan. It’s a style that screams alt girl from the 80’s or crazy houseless woman in her 50’s and I’ll continue to dress this way until presented with an intervention… and probably a while after that.

“I have an appointment with Gwendolyn. She’s expecting me,” I said, sounding more serious than I intended to the nodding woman wearing a Ramone’s t-shirt and a pixie cut.

“I think she’s in the back. I’ll go grab her!”

Moments later, Gwendolyn appeared in a dark pullover and loose jeans. She noticed me staring at one display.

“Do you have one?” she whispered in a benevolent almost maternal tone.

I beamed. “YES!” and whipped out my phone to show off my girl, Amelia. The two women behind the counter came to ooh and aah along with their boss. Pet lovers are on a friendship fast-track with me and January’s low/ no social life left me giddy during this interaction. We cooed at pictures of my dog and theirs until it was time to get down to business.

The request was simple: delicious vegan appetizers, easily eaten without a fork or plate. Grab it and pop it in your mouth kinda stuff.

“That’s my a-game,” I assured Gwendolyn with a confident grin.

“I’d also like to serve a dessert. Maybe a mini cheesecake or custardy tart thing,” she said.

“No chocolate!!!” A blue-haired woman in front of the register added. “There will be many dogs in attendance!”

“Right, good point. No chocolate. Can you handle it?” Gwendolyn and I agreed that I would figure dessert out and get back to her.

I skipped out of the pet store even happier than when I had entered. I love booking parties that I know I can nail, especially when they’re for good (pet-loving) people that I want to take care of.

I had so many ideas swirling in my cookbook brain that I could hardly keep my hands on the steering wheel.

And that’s where I hit the wall.

We are living in an incredible culinary time. As our bodies become less tolerant to many foodstuffs, we have overcome the challenges with substitutions and workarounds that make any meal possible for anyone. As a foodie businesswoman, I appreciate the development of these hacks so that I can cook more food for more people, but I also have an unspoken rule of don’t push it. Given the parameters of a vegan dessert, it seems like you’re walking right into the line of fire with a cheesecake or custard. When the first 3 ingredients of the non-vegan version are cream cheese, butter, and eggs you know you’re going to taste the substitutions. Yes, it’s been done marvelously by bakeries whose number one job was to develop recipes with workarounds, but I don’t get asked to do this enough times to make it worth the new recipe development time and money. I’m not lazy, it’s just a bad use of my resources.

That’s when it hit me… apple cider donuts—mini ones.

I developed this recipe years ago and it has both butter and eggs, but they are supporting not featured characters. They could easily be replaced without much difference to the quality. And what better time than now to work on a recipe with an egg substitution!

I started with flax seeds, which I ground into 2 tablespoons worth and mixed with 6 tablespoons of water and then let sit for 15 minutes as the mixture thickened a bit. This was the substitution for 2 eggs. The butter replacement was easy with a plant-based salt-free butter.

The dough came together well and I piped two dozen rounds into a mini donut pan. The donuts tasted good, but the texture wasn’t up to snuff. They were crumbly and fell apart when I flipped the pan over.

I left the “lab” of my home kitchen and headed out to the store for some applesauce, the other tried and true egg substitute.

Francis, my husband looked up from the couch where he was nap-reading.

“Where are you going?”

“Fred Meyer. The first batch of vegan donuts didn’t work. They’re too crumbly. It’s applesauce time.”

“Gotcha. See you soon.”

As I wound my way through the supermarket aisles, I got a text.

It was Francis. “What crumbly donuts? I didn’t see any donuts in the kitchen.”

“Haha! I lol’ed in Freddie’s!” I texted back. Which was true. I laughed out loud because Francis isn’t the sugar lover that I am. I was glad he found them and ate a few so I could interrogate him about the flavor.

Back home, I walked into the kitchen to find a completely empty donut pan with a donut-less sheet pan underneath. He had eaten every single crumbly donut I had made!

“I couldn’t stop. I really tried, I swear.” He didn’t look like he had tried at all. He did look satisfied though, so I took that as a sign I was on the right track.

The apple sauce trick of using ¼ cup for every egg in the recipe was even better. Francis was too full of donuts by that point to be an honest judge, but he suffered through a few for love and food science and then a few more just to be sure.

My plight was well worth it, though I know I’ll have to make twice as many apple cider donuts as any vegan mini cheesecakes because they are impossible to stop eating once you start.

Vegan Mini Apple Cider Donuts

Ingredients

• cooking spray or vegan butter for the donut pan
• 1 cup all-purpose unbleached flour
• ¾ cup whole wheat pastry flour
• ¼ teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon nutmeg
• ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
• 10 tablespoons unsalted vegan butter, melted
• ¾ cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup white sugar
• ½ cup applesauce
• 1 ½ teaspoon vanilla
• ¾ teaspoon lemon juice
• ½ cup apple cider

Topping

• 4 tablespoons unsalted vegan butter, melted
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• Pinch of salt

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Spray a mini donut pan with cooking spray.
3. In a large bowl, sift the flours with the baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Set aside.
4. In a medium bowl, stir together the melted vegan butter with the brown and white sugars. Stir in applesauce, vanilla, and lemon juice.
5. Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and stir together until combined. Stir in the apple cider until blended.
6. Transfer the batter into a piping bag or a ziplock bag with the corner snipped off to make a small hole to pipe the batter into the sprayed donut pan.
7. Bake the donuts for 12 minutes.
8. While the donuts are baking, pour the melted butter for the topping into a shallow bowl. In another bowl, mix the sugar, cinnamon and salt.
9. When the donuts have cooled a bit, dip one side into the butter and then dip into the sugar mix.

And here’s a clip of me making these mini vegan donuts on KATU’s Afternoon Live: