If you missed my earlier posts, a bunch of us Australian and Kiwi vegans get together each year to wallow in gratefulness, being thankful and of course oodles of amazing vegan food! This year, these Vegan Apple Crumble Donuts will be my contribution and I'm super excited for everyone to try them.
This recipe was inspired by a post I saw while trawling Pinterest for Thanksgiving desert inspiration. It worked, so yay for Pinterest and all the amazing people who post there! (Not sponsored by the way just a fan). A huge shout out to Connoisseurus Veg for creating this wonderful recipe and the details of how to make it can be found on her blog here. Alissa has many delicious looking vegan recipes that I want to try so I'm thinking about just starting from the top and just working my way through them all!
I made some tweaks to the original recipe making it more appley and nutty. This new recipe was a great addition to our Vegan Thanksgiving bonanza and a new twist on traditional thanksgiving flavours or apple, cinnamon and pecans. These donuts are moist (sorry I know some people find that word cringe worthy), dense, but fluffy and full of delicious, comforting flavours. By the way, these are BAKED not fried, so a few less calories at least. We made a few extra to take to our work friends and they were a resounding hit! I love to surprise people don't eat plant based with just how amazing the food can be and see their shocked expressions when they realise that eating vegan includes foods they never expected to be possible.
Alright, enough chit chat, let me explain the changes I made.
For the crumble topping, I added some chopped pecans to give it some crunch (approx 1/4 cup) and I swapped out the melted coconut oil for vegan butter as I saw some in the grocery store and wanted to try it. The coconut oil works great and is much easier to get your hands on than vegan butter, but if you can, I think it's worth the swap.
My only addition to the donut butter was more apple! I know donut batter is meant to be smooth not chunky but in this case I think more is more. I used Pink Lady apples as suggested and their sweet crisp flavour worked super well.
I also made the icing slightly thicker by only adding a dash (and yes that is the technical term . . .) of almond milk. I'm not a very good decorator when it comes to cakes, cupcakes, donuts, cookies, you get the drift, so the thicker version helped me to drizzle the icing easier.
And the best thing? No frying! These donuts are baked in the oven using donut pans. Genius! The thought of frying the donuts has always put me off making them before but if I can make donuts this good in the oven then I'm in.
All in all, this is a very straightforward recipe, the end result is delicious and EVERYONE loved them. Even our non-vegan friends and work colleagues loved these. I always get a kick out of the surprise and shock when people eat something delicious and can't believe its vegan.
As part of our vegan thanksgiving meal we made the following side dishes and accompaniments:
Nora Cooks Easy Vegan Gravy (OMG this stuff is awesome! Such a great recipe, very easy to make and with ingredients you would find in a standard vegan pantry!)
Salad - adapted from The Girl Who Ate Everything pomegranate feta salad. Swapped out the pomegranate for dried cranberries as pomegranates are currently out of season and used dairy free feta cheese.
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