Cinderella’s Pumpkin Spice Doughnut Holes

A sprinkle of baking magic transforms these plain little pumpkin muffins into sparkly, delicious, doughnuts!

For my first Cinderella snack post I wanted to make something with pumpkin, for obvious Cinderella reasons. These pumpkin spice doughnut holes are a great option for a snack while watching the movie because:

• They’re not only pumpkin flavoured, they’re *almost* spherical, making them even more carriage-like!
• They’re easy finger food (though if you’re a messy eater like me, a napkin might be required!)
• They’re fun to make- doughnuts without frying? Amazing!

I know here in the UK it’s coming up to summer, but back home in Tasmania, winter is coming, and fresh, hot cinnamon doughnuts are perfect to snuggle up on the couch with and watch a Disney film! 

Now, I actually used three different recipes to make this magic;

• A pumpkin puree recipe from Allrecipes
• A pumpkin spice recipe from Live Well Bake Often
• A pumpkin doughnut hole recipe from Cakescottage

I found all three recipes straightforward and easy to follow, and now I even have leftover pumpkin spice to use later! 

So I started with the pumpkin puree, and because I had bought pumpkin that was already chopped (thank you Tesco’s!) all I had to do was boil and blend it in the food processor. If you don’t have a food processor, you can also mash it with a potato masher. 

While I was waiting for the pumpkin to cool down, I made the pumpkin spice mix, this was really easy, just combining the spices and mixing. I made it in a plastic container so that I could just pop the lid on when I was done. Because the doughnut recipe only requires a teaspoon of the spice mix, I halved this recipe. 

For the doughnuts themselves, I started by mixing the dry ingredients- plain flour, baking powder, salt, pumpkin spice and nutmeg- into a smaller bowl (Mickey-themed of course!) 

Then I added the pumpkin puree and brown sugar to the larger bowl and mixed it together. This was followed by the vegetable oil, egg, and vanilla extract, and then the milk. It was then just a matter of adding the dry ingredients to the wet, and mixing until it was all combined (though not overmixing). 

I was very excited to *have* to buy a mini muffin tin for this project I’ve always wanted one! I managed to find one on Amazon for under £8, which is pretty decent! Unfortunately what I forgot to buy was cooking spray, meaning I had to individually grease the muffin moulds with butter, not the most fun thing to do. So while the doughnuts came out very easily, I would recommend cooking spray for a quicker, easier job. 

It took a couple of attempts to figure out how much mixture should go in the tin, I eventually found that a heaped teaspoon would fill it about to the ¾ mark (maybe a little over) as the recipe requires. 

The recipe requires 10-12 minutes in the oven at 180 degrees, mine were done in 10! As they’re so small they cooled really quickly and were ready for the final part- dipping in melted butter, then rolling in cinnamon sugar. 

This was definitely the most fiddly part of the recipe, and the messiest! I may have flung quite a lot of sugar around the kitchen… But it was awesome to see these fairly plain little blobs be transformed (like Cinderella!) into sparkly, delicious doughnuts! I would like to imagine that these are what Cinderella brings to Tiana as her twist on beignets!