Baked Churro Cake Donuts Recipe

While the desire for homemade churros may be great at times, the mess of deep frying is enough to turn most home bakers off this treat. For our baked churro cake donuts, we took the same flavor you know and love in these Mexican confections and turned them into an easy-to-bake cake donut. That way, you can have your churros and your donuts, too.

As the food blogger behind At the Immigrant's Table, I'm a big fan of transforming complicated baked goods from around the world into something any cooking enthusiast can make at home. These cake donuts are an example of that: an attempt to take a familiar international sweet treat that may be intimidating, and convert it into a simple, easy recipe that even beginners can master.

Our recipe takes the typical flavors of a churro — cinnamon, sugar, and a smooth Mexican chocolate dipping sauce — and combines them with our favorite cake donut recipe. The resulting donuts are gooey but airy, chewy on the inside and crispy on the outside. You can choose between cinnamon sugar, chocolate coating, or have the best of both worlds and use both. And if you want to crisp your donuts even further, you can take a page from our advice on how not to dry out your churros, and place a cup of boiling water on the lowest rack of your oven during pre-baking. Either way, your donut recipe might just be everyone's favorite dessert.

For the donuts themselves, you'll need all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, fine sea salt, granulated sugar, eggs, plain whole-milk yogurt, whole milk, a neutral oil like avocado or sunflower, and pure vanilla extract. Yogurt is key to the cake-like texture of these donuts. Just keep in mind that if you use Greek yogurt, your donuts may have a denser texture but a higher protein count.

For topping our donuts, we recommend two different options. If you're going the classic churro cinnamon sugar coating route, you'll need granulated sugar, ground cinnamon, and unsalted butter. If you prefer the chocolate dipping sauce, you'll need dark chocolate and heavy cream. When choosing your dark chocolate, opt for a brand with 60%-70% cacao and a short ingredient list. Optionally, if you're a fan of the salty-sweet contrast, you may want to grab some flaky sea salt for topping the chocolate donuts.

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Grease two standard 6-well donut pans thoroughly, including the center posts.

Fit a large piping bag with a large open-star tip.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Make a well in the center.

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, yogurt, milk, oil, and vanilla until smooth and fully combined.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Fold with a spatula until just combined. Do not overmix.

Transfer the batter to the piping bag.

Pipe in a continuous circle to fill each well about half full. Do not smooth the batter after piping.

Bake for 12 minutes, until the tops spring back when lightly pressed and a toothpick comes out clean. Do not overbake.

Cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack. Cool for 5 more minutes.

For the cinnamon sugar coating, stir together the sugar and cinnamon in a shallow bowl.

Brush each donut lightly with melted butter, then toss them in the sugar mix to coat the top.

For the chocolate dipping sauce, combine the chocolate and cream in a heatproof bowl. Microwave in 20-second bursts, stirring between each, until fully melted and glossy.

Dip the top half of each donut in the chocolate and set them aside to dry. Sprinkle with flaky salt, if desired. Let the donuts sit for 10 minutes before serving.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Serve the churro donuts with more dipping sauce on the side.

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Technically, these donuts can be deep-fried, but for a variety of reasons, we'd like to steer you towards baking them instead. Since the batter here is a cake donut batter. It's softer and more hydrated than a traditional churro dough, which is a choux-based paste that holds its shape well in hot oil.

If you drop this batter into a fryer, it won't hold its shape as well due to its mass. Instead, it will spread and lose structure before it sets, resulting in more of a fritter than a churro-style donut.

If you're looking for a donut you can deep fry, you'd need to rework the recipe entirely by reducing the liquid and skipping the baking soda and powder, a change that would give you a stiffer dough, and you would need to pipe it directly into the oil like you would with churros. You'd also be losing the soft, airy interior of a cake donut that this recipe achieves, which is a great counterpart to the crispy, cinnamon-sugar-dusted exterior. So though you could fry these, we suggest choosing the tidier route and baking them instead.

One fun aspect of making these donuts is that the churro flavor can be paired with almost any sauce you like. While chocolate is a natural fit, there are a few other options that any churro lover would recognize and appreciate when choosing a topping for these cake donuts.

Our second favorite after chocolate is undoubtedly dulce de leche, which matches with the Latin origin of the churro and works perfectly with the cinnamon sugar, with its deep, rich caramel flavor. You can also go with a salted caramel sauce for more complexity and contrast.

If you want something brighter, a classic vanilla glaze of powdered sugar, the seeds from a vanilla pod, and milk makes for a lovely counterpart. Another favorite of ours is to add dried powdered strawberry to this glaze, or make a fresh raspberry or strawberry coulis as a dipping sauce for more tartness to offset the sweetness of the donuts.

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