Pumpkin doughnuts with coconut glaze

I've had Pro Home Cooks/Brothers Green Eats/Mike G's "Healthy" Doughnut recipe on my to-do list ever since it was published a couple of years ago. The promise of a good, but not overly sweet, doughnut glaze was tempting. I took the occasion of Caty's birthday a couple of days ago to make my own version (as, obviously, mine cannot include butter, milk or eggs).

Kabocha Pumpkin Doughnut

• one 398 mL can pureed pumpkin (the stuff in my cupboard happened to be organic)
• 4 T (60 g) vegan margarine, melted
• 1 cup (250 mL) hemp milk
• 1 T (15 mL) honey
• 1 T yeast
• the equivalent of 2 eggs in egg replacer powder
• 5 cups of flour
• ½ t salt

I melted the margarine and added the room-temperature hemp milk, pulling the mixture off the heat. It was lukewarm at this point and I added the honey and stirred in the yeast. Into the large bowl of my stand mixer, I added the flour, egg replacer powder and salt and used the dough hook to stir it together. Once the yeast mixture had formed a sponge, I added it and the pumpkin to the flour mixture and began the mixer on low. The original amount of flour called for in the recipe has nowhere near adequate, so I kept adding flour until I ended up with a wet dough, banking on it needing to rest to stop being sticky. I allowed that to proof, covered, for about an hour, then punched it down and began cutting out the doughnuts, laying them on parchment squares on a baking sheet for easy removal. Those were allowed to proof further, for an hour, under a floured cloth. For this batch, I fried the two "extra" doughnuts day-of, and allowed the remaining 12 to do a slow-rise overnight in the fridge. I can't say that the pumpkin really brings anything to this dough, unfortunately. It makes the dough denser than my ideal doughnut would be, but could be a good fritter base if I wanted to experiment with spicing it in the future.

As for the glaze, I adapted the original recipe as well.

Coconut Glaze (makes two batches worth)

• ~1 cup (half a 498 mL jar) coconut manna
• 1 tsp gelatin
• 1 T hemp milk, plus enough to get to desired consistency
• ¾ cup icing sugar
• pinch of salt
• ~1 tsp vanilla

I'd tried to use the recommended amount of sugar, but found that it was barely sweet, and would definitely not be sweet enough to make the doughnut worth eating, so I had to bump up the amount considerably. I am, however, a huge fan of using the coconut manna as a "filler"; it makes the glaze coconut-flavoured without being overpowering. I also found that the gelatin didn't cause the glaze to set up as nicely as it did for the original recipe — it was still a bit gel-like even when "dry". That said, I'd absolutely work with this again, seeing about omitting the gelatin entirely next time, and maybe using a coconut milk (or citrus juice!) instead of the hemp milk.

This was a decent "start" towards something really good, but I can't claim that I thought it was a great substitute for a traditional yeasted doughnut.