Chocolate Donuts Filled w/Bourbon Flavored Peanut Butter

This recipe has been in my queue for a while.  My queue is all of the recipes that I find online poring through other food blogs and e-mail them to myself.   They looked decadent and even over the top to me and sometimes when I see a recipe like this I hesitate to make it just because I think it might be too over the top.  But it was my turn to bring in breakfast at work so I felt that as long as I was distributing the over the topness then I could convince myself to finally make these.  And I actually didn't need too much convincing because I really like making donuts.  They're so fun.

You can make them in various shapes and sizes and fill them or not fill them and frost them or not frost them and roll them in cinnamon and sugar or just sugar or just cinnamon or not.  And you can make either cake donuts or yeasted ones--and what's more you can fry them or bake them!    See?  They're very versatile.

So this recipe is a yeasted filled donut that is fried in oil--which in my donut making experience I have found to be my favorite type to make. It requires some more work and time but in the end--if everything goes well you've got yourself a superb donut.

I inadvertently adapted the recipe from here.  Inadvertently because evidently I didn't read the ingredients as thoroughly as I should.  Needless to say that deep into my preparation I realized that amongst many things I didn't have any half and half and I was a teaspoon short on the yeast.  Alas, I made some compensations and adaptations and all was well.  For the most part.


Here is what I did instead:

I followed the streusal topping and the peanut butter pastry cream down to the letter.  Both turned out great except that the pastry cream was a bit "chunky" or curdled looking after I whisked in the peanut butter itself.  So I put it in my mixer with the whisk attachment and whisked the hell out of it until it came together--which it did just fine.  Also I probably put somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 a cup of bourbon in the mixture.  I decided to do it 1 tablespoon at a time because in all honesty I 'm not a huge fan of boozy desserts.  I wanted to be able to just ever so slightly taste the bourbon.  But, I kept feeling as though I couldn't yet so I continued to add tablespoon after tablespoon and I lost track of how much I actually added (the fact that I was watching Seinfeld re-runs may have contributed to my distraction also...).  Nevertheless in the end I think it was too much.  After it settles in and marinades the pastry cream its presence becomes much stronger so next time I would either nix it as a whole or just add a couple tablespoons total.

For the donuts themselves I applied everything exactly as the original recipe aside from the following:

2 tbsp + 1 tsp of active dry yeast vs. 2 tbsp + 2 tsp
2 c of buttermilk vs. 2 c of half and half
4-5 c of all-purpose flour vs 4-5 c of bread flour  (also, it took me more like 6 c to get to the consistency described in the original recipe)
1/4 granulated sugar

Lastly, for the chocolate glaze I followed the instructions with the exception of:

1 tbsp of light corn syrup vs tbsp of dark corn syrup

All in all the donuts were great.  Generally it was received well with my co-workers.  At the same time the dough itself was a bit too dense--denser than my go-to yeasted donut recipe I have used.  But that may have been a result of some of my substitutions too.  Eh.