Waiting for Baby: Making Donuts!

For Christmas we gave Susannah the Richard Scary book, Humberdink's Busy Day. In the book Humberdink and his helper, Able Baker Charlie, make donuts. Susannah has been asking off and on since Christmas if we could make donuts sometime.

Making donuts isn't really that difficult, but it is a little time consuming and when it comes to the frying (because in my book fried donuts are the only REAL donuts) it is an all-or-nothing, undivided attention, must be very, very careful, part of the process. For this reason I knew it was not a project I should tackle without another adult around.

This past Thursday Daniel had the day off since his work is slow right now, and I asked if he could help at the key points of a donut making adventure. He and the girls were outside most of the morning and I mixed up the dough it had risen and was ready to cut out by about 11:30. I was going to have the girls help with the cutting out then realized that they would get just as much satisfaction out of helping me cut out a few as they would cutting ALL of them out, so I started the process alone.
They wandered in from outside in time to help with the last few rollings and cuttings of the dough. Each of the girls got a small wad of dough to roll out with their own little rolling pins.

Sylvia ended up eating her dough, but Susannah tasted some and saved some to cut into donut holes. I think we ended up with 18-20 donuts and about 10 donut holes. Then it was time for those to "take a nap" in the oven while we ate lunch. By the time we'd finished with lunch they were ready to start frying!

The girls really wanted to watch, so with very careful and deliberate safety instructions given and with Daniel's help, they watched me fry all of the donuts in our little deep fryer. It took until almost their naptime to fry the donuts. Then I mixed up the glaze and glazed a couple donut holes so they could each have a hot, fresh donut hole before their naps. Normally we don't do food or even sugary sweets before naptime but this was obviously a VERY special occasion and nothing is as good as a hot, fresh, homemade donut!!

It took me a while to glaze the donuts and by the time I had finished up the entire donut making process my legs and feet were aching from all the standing, but it was a fun way to pass another day waiting for our baby to be born.