Easy No-Egg Doughnuts with Biscuit Dough

Melissa asked for my doughnut recipe and I just had to share. This is my 'I'm going for quick and easy so I'm not even making my own dough' recipe. Just so you are warned!

Ingredients:

• Oil - enough to fill your pan 1/2 inch full. This is what you will be frying the doughnuts in. I use a large skillet to cook as many doughnuts at once as possible.
• Biscuit dough - I buy cans. The first time we used jumbo biscuits and cut a hole in the middle. The second time we used regular small biscuits and didn't bother with adding a hole. It is much easier to cook the smaller biscuits all the way through! For the 11 of us I made 80 small doughnuts and we had leftovers for the second day.
• 2 sticks of butter - You will melt this and dip the cooked doughnuts in butter before topping, unless you are using icing.
• Toppings - powdered sugar, cinnamon and sugar, icing, etc.
• TOOLS: You MUST have tongs or something to turn the biscuits in the hot oil and remove them. I also like to have paper towels for the cooling step.

Here is my setup from the first time we made doughnuts. You can see a cookie sheet on the left of the stove for uncooked biscuit dough, the pan of hot oil, a cookie sheet with paper towels for cooling a bit, bowls with butter and toppings for dipping, and a cookie sheet for finished doughnuts.

What to do:

1. Heat your 1/2 inch of oil in a pan on medium.
2. Melt your butter in a bowl.
3. Put any other toppings in bowls.
4. Put biscuits in the oil and cook until the bottom is golden brown, then turn over and cook the other side of biscuit to golden brown. This takes just a minute or so per side, depending on how hot your oil is.
5. Remove cooked doughnuts to a pan to cool enough to handle. I line this pan with paper towels.
6. Once cool enough to handle dip your cooked doughnut in butter and roll in your topping. The only exception - if you are icing your doughnut you can skip the dipping in butter.
7. Eat. And cook more doughnuts.

Tobias really liked the chocolate dipped doughnuts!

See what I mean? Easy. Please remember that any time you are cooking with hot oil you need to be very careful. Once we begin the doughnut process I do not walk away from the pan of oil. I have a helper who does the buttering and topping of doughnuts because I don't want to take any chances that a child might walk near the stove with a pan full of hot oil.