Happy New Donuts for a Happy New Year

Happy 2011, everyone!  And what better way to kick off the New Year than with a brand new blog and a few tips on festively finishing your donuts?  That’s right!  Our first lesson at Donut YOUniversity is all about incorporating a little color to your everyday donut.

A traditional New Year’s Eve is celebrated with streamers, confetti, and a few good friends.  And, let’s face it, New Year’s Day is traditionally celebrated with recuperation, minimal work, and a soupçon of new regrets.  Let’s start your customers’ year the right way by offering them a vibrant and filling breakfast – which they won’t have to cook!

Happy New Donuts!

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Directly after finishing the donut with the icing, it’s time to add the confetti.  You can use a variety of different jimmies (or sprinkles) to create this effect.  There are many different sizes, shapes, and colors of jimmies that are commercially available; your bakery specialist should be able to help you get these if you don’t already have them. You can pack on these motley-colored sugar bits with bravado or they can be used sparingly.  Just keep in mind the price of adding on your hundreds and thousands; even tiny pieces of sweetness can snowball into a hefty sum of cash at the end of the year! 

Make sure that you add any jimmies to the icing while still warm and soft.  Once that icing sets, the only way to keep your confetti from falling off is by mashing it into the donut – something we do not recommend!

Finally, add your warm greetings.  We chose “Happy New Year,” but you can be more creative.  Some of our favorites:

Have One Sweet Year!

Happy 2011!

Happy Hangover!

For our lettering, we used chocolate flat icing, prepared at manufacturer’s recommended temperature, and put into an icing bag.  If you prefer, you may also use gel icing.

A Good Tip:  Make sure you’ve written out your message on paper to see how it looks and how much space you may need.  It’s also a good time to have a friend or coworker spell-check the message before transferring it to the donuts.  Trust us, you may not have noticed the spelling error, but your customers will immediately!  A steady hand and lots of practice will ensure beautiful penmanship.

New Year's Streamers

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Each of these donuts took a minute or less to prepare.  As you become more comfortable finishing and designing, this amount of time will diminish. 

So there you have it!  Simple and inexpensive reasons for your customers to forget their New Year’s resolution.  And speaking of resolutions, our resolution to you is to keep these posts rolling regularly, bringing you many more tips to make your donuts fly out of your pastry case!