All You Need Is Store-Bought Pancake Mix To Make Delicious Donuts At Home

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Ahh, the humble donut — sweet, delicious, and versatile. You can enjoy them plain if you like the minimalist approach, or filled. You can also top them with an endless array of treats, from a simple glaze to cookie crumbles, sprinkles, and sauces. Typically a donut is the purview of a professional baker. It's a treat you leave the house to get. Maybe you'll buy a half dozen, or even a full dozen, and hope that most of them aren't purloined by family or coworkers so you can enjoy some of the different flavors. But, you can also save yourself the trouble of going out by whipping up your own batch using pancake mix. Baked or fried, you'll be enjoying your own version of donuts in no time with this simple trick.

There are plenty of donut recipes out there, and a pancake donut isn't exactly the same as a traditional yeast donut. But you can get pretty close to the real thing depending on the recipe and how you prepare it, which may require the addition of an egg or an egg substitute to hold it all together. For a more authentic donut, you can use an instant pancake mix and mix three parts of it with one part milk instead of water. What you're going for here is not a batter but a dough. It will be a little rough and lumpy looking, but that's okay. Transfer to a floured surface and roll it out to ¼" thickness. Then use any round cutter to shape the donuts, cut out the hole, and fry them in a pan until golden on both sides. Then, you can coat or glaze them in any flavor or fashion you prefer.

Of course, one of the benefits of making donuts at home is that you can customize them. That goes beyond flavors and ingredients to the actual preparation method — with baking being the go-to technique if you prefer something lighter. Simply mix the pancake batter exactly as directed, sticking with the water as opposed to substituting it for milk. Then, pour the batter into donut molds and bake in the oven for around 8 minutes. These donuts will come out much more like traditional pancakes with a lighter, fluffier texture than the fried version. You can also mix them with sprinkles, chocolate chips, blueberries, and other fillings before baking. 

Store-bought pancake mix is great for making all kinds of desserts, and the real benefit is how much time you're saving. It's not always easy to make it to a bakery every morning for fresh donuts, and not everyone has the time to prepare them from scratch at home. Even with the fried version, the process of mixing, rolling, and cutting pancake donut dough is only going to take a few minutes. From start to finish, you can have this all squared away in less than 30 minutes. That includes cook time, since frying these should only take 2 to 3 minutes per side at most. These donuts travel well and freeze easily too, so you can make a large batch and defrost them throughout the week as needed.