Sweet Hearts for Your Valentine's Day Sweetheart

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.  And how can you show your loved ones you care without breaking the bank?  How about Valentine Donuts – they’re very simple to design and you can create an annual tradition that is both personal

                                                        and thoughtful.

Start by thawing a dozen of Mel-O-Cream’s Heart-Shaped Shells.  Yes, these yeast-raised sweets are pre-cut into hearts before you  receive them – talk about your cutting corners!  

While you wait for these Valentines to thaw, you should start thinking about how you would like them to look as, literally, a finished product.  Do you go pink or red or white?  Are you going to add some intricate lacework around the edges or candies across the top?  Another favorite among our customers is making a multi-colored assortment of pastel hearts reminiscent of the popular candy hearts.  Keep in mind that the more intricate the design, the more time you will spend per donut.

 

What we’ve done here is top the hearts with an electric pink flat icing.  This was made with white icing and red food coloring.  Pink icing is much easier to render than red.  This is because white flat icing contains titanium dioxide or white pigment that makes it more difficult to alter the original color of the icing.  So even though you’ve added a large amount of red food coloring to your icing, it may result in a very pink pigment.  But not to worry, just continue to add red food coloring gradually to your icing until you achieve the tint of choice, like this cherry blush icing shown here.

Next, we added the same icing to a bag and composed our messages of fondness onto the hearts.  Check out the slides below for some ideas:

Design those valentines

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Here’s a quick tip if you wanted to add roses to your donuts:  Ask your cake decorator to make some roses with a butter cream based frosting.  These frostings stiffen quickly and will take form easier than the flat donut icing.  These roses can be made a few days ahead of time, so long as they are immediately refrigerated.  But if you want to learn how to make butter cream roses, our friends at Wilton have a very thorough pictorial procedure on their website.  If you choose to refrigerate them, we recommend dusting the pan with powdered sugar to ensure that they will not stick to the bottom.  Anyone who's made this mistake knows that you'll end up with a rosy mess!

These Sweet Hearts are sure to please on V-Day!

Let's Build Some Doughmen!

Who doesn’t like building snowmen?  Well, except for those who can’t stand the cold.  This is a fun little project that you can do, or you can have children make on a cold winter’s day – and don’t have to go outside to enjoy.

For this project, we used Mel-O-Cream's yeast-raised trees.  These donuts come to you as frozen dough or pre-fried.  There is a myriad of possibilities that spring forth from these trees.  You'll find out just how versatile all of our shapes are throughout the months to come.

As always, make sure your donuts are completely thawed out, as condensation can easily melt this snowman's icing!  When you've made certain that each donut has thawed, you can begin to top your Doughmen with a nice flat, white icing.

Adorning Your Doughmen:

As always, if you wish to add anything to flat icing, you need to be mindful that the flat icing will set in 10-30 seconds.  Because this project may take you more time to decorate, we recommend adding your sprinkles, jimmies, and candies before you apply any other icing.  For example, we added this doughman's little blue buttons directly after coating him in snow white icing.

Once the flat, white icing has set, you can start decorating your snowmen with the colored icing of your choice.  We chose a chocolate flat icing piped into a bag with a small, round-tipped applicator.  You can also use gel icing, as many come prepackaged with an applicator.  First, draw lines across the points where the donut puckers in: one across the top for the brim of the hat, a slightly curved line across the second pucker to frame the face or create a scarf, and the last line at the base.  This gives the illusion of three stacked snowballs. 

Go back to the first line and add a top for that top hat.  You can accomplish this simply by adding a rectangle or horseshoe shape to the line and fill it in with the same color of icing.  Eyes made out of coal?  How about chocolate icing instead!  Or you could substitute candies for the eyes.  For the nose, we mixed orange food coloring with white icing.  Red Hots and Candy Corn are also favorites.  And, of course, give that dougman a great big smile.

Overall, these doughmen took just a minute a piece to decorate.  It's up to you regarding how dapper your doughmen will look.  Just remember that more flair means more time to prepare.  Bring these guys to your next office or PTA meeting.  They're a real icebreaker!

Sugar-Coated Lemon Drop Donuts

Not only does Mel-O-Cream offer its cake ring donuts in a variety of delectable flavors, but in its donut holes as well.  Today, we’re going to learn how to make powdered Lemon Drop Donut Holes.  Watch this video on finishing donut holes with sugar.



Warning: Our Powdered Donuts Are Not Coated with Powdered Sugar!

Ask your distributor if they carry a Donut Coating Sugar.  This is the optimum variety of coating to use for lemon donuts holes, as it has been formulated to withstand the moisture and fat of the donuts.  Donut Coating sugar is made from Dextrose, corn starch, and oil as well as possible flavors and or colors. Do not use powdered sugar; regular powdered sugar will melt due to the fat and moisture.  One interesting feature of Dextrose is the cooling sensation felt when it is applied to your tongue.  You will not get this from Sucrose (Powdered Sugar): instead, you would get a warming sensation. Powdered sugar is a disaccharide made up of Fructose and Dextrose, Fructose being sweeter than Sucrose and Dextrose only being 70% as sweet as Sucrose.

But, if you’re stubborn and still choose to use powdered sugar, make certain that the donut holes are completely thawed out and warmed.  If they are not, condensation can occur, and you will not attain proper sugar adhesion.

Warning:  Save Your Holes!  

Since donut holes have far less surface area than regular cake donuts (even though Mel-O-Cream's Donut Holes are Gargantuan!), they are more prone to dry out.  Therefore, it is imperative that you package  

                                                          your donut holes properly. 

These bite-sized delights take only minutes to prepare.  Have your customers line up with your Sugar-Coated Lemon Drops!

Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Cake Donuts

Here at Mel-O-Cream, we offer our celebrated Donut of the Month.  For more information on our flavors and what time of year to expect them, go to our website here.  The month of January welcomes one of our customers’ favorite flavors of cake donut: Lemon.

These donuts have a very clean and zesty citrus flavor.  And you can easily add some visual zest to your donuts by finishing the top of your lemon cake ring donuts in bold, yellow icing.

What we’ve done here is topped our tasty treats with vanilla icing combined with yellow food coloring.  It’s very easy to transform any plain vanilla icing into any hue you choose.  First, warm the icing to the recommended temperature.  Then, slowly add your selected food coloring a few drops at a time.  Your goal is to make a color that is slightly lighter than the color you actually wish to achieve.  This is because the icing will darken a shade when warmed up to the appropriate usage temperature.

Remember This:  Not all food colorings are created equal.  So don’t throw in all the color at once!  Instead, a gradual blending of color to the icing will guarantee the correct tint.

If you really want to add a kick to your lemon cake donuts, you can use a lemon frosting.  Ask your distributor if they carry this flavor of icing; if not, you may need to improvise.  Here's an idea:  after obtaining the desired yellow color for your vanilla icing, simply add some lemon flavoring from your spice section. 

Remember That:  A little goes a LONG way when it comes to lemon flavoring, so use sparingly.

After finishing the donuts with this canary-colored icing, we added a smattering of saffron sprinkles.

Remember Again:  Sprinkles will fall off if the icing has set, so only finish a couple at a time.

And voila!  Easy-Peasy-Lemon-Squeezy cake donuts!

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!