Donuts!!!

The food prep company ReBuilt Meals makes delicious gluten free donuts. They are thick and dense with  plenty of frosting and toppings and they come in fun flavors like dreamsicle, Rice Krispie treat, s'mores, chocolate covered strawberry, cookies n creme, grasshopper, the list goes on!
Their donuts gave me donuts on the mind ;).
Vegan8 is a blog you may know of - I get their emails. This weekend they made vegan gluten free chocolate donuts.
Much of America, and this house, are under social distance protocol to not spread the COVID19 virus - it's not a snow day (people have plenty to say about this on the internet), and it will be in the 80s here all week (except when it's in the 90s), but there is something...nesty...or cozy feeling about this "holing up" at home that makes me want to B.A.K.E. I want to create hygge...possibly it helps that because it is in the 80s/90s the AC is cranked.

So hygge. Chair with blanket, candle, warm beverage. Free photo from pixabay

A small complication with this strong desire to bake is that our oven gave up last June (2019). We were lucky that my parents gave me the very nice birthday gift of a Cuisinart toaster oven-convection-air fryer combo that has been powering through the last 9 months.
(What can I say? He's a public high school teacher in Florida and I'm a PhD student - it feels right in some way to not have an oven because we'd rather have fresh food (and no oven payment) than only cheap ramen to cook on our new stove top.)
When I saw Vegan 8's recipe for vegan gluten free oil free donuts in my inbox yesterday, the forced isolation emboldened me to take on this project. The project of adapting the recipe to the toaster oven.
This is counterintuitive, but the very specific directions from the original recipe about the 13 minute cooking time on 350, and the fact that you must only make these in a donut pan (and the provision of several delicious muffin tin recipes to make instead if you have no donut pan - she is serious! Don't make these without a donut pan!) made me feel like I could try to adapt it and it might be okay. Because of the precision in all of the directions I trusted this recipe deeply. The control factor was high.
I did venture out to Whole Foods - it was 9:00 on a Sunday when most people wouldn't be out. I wiped my cart down and didn't touch any people, and wasn't near any people. I was able to locate arrowhead oat flour, 365 tapioca starch, and bob's red mill fine almond flour. In the flour aisle I killed a flour moth - they reeked havoc in my pantry in the past and I imagined I was doing a service to many people by killing this one month - but still I couldn't help but notice floating to the top of my mind "when a butterfly flaps its wings" and think of the Ray Bradbury story about the dinosaur tour and the dead butterfly and all of the ways in which the future was changed because on the time traveling dinosaur tour a bungling tourist killed a bug. When I got home I took off my clothes and put them in the washing machine - this just feels responsible - my partner is choosing not to leave the house so I feel any less effort on my part would be a wrong doing.
This afternoon, after walking my dog, I attempted the donuts while catching up with a dear old friend over text.

My Rough Collie after a walk, chilling with his cat family member

Based on some middle-gooey, outside crunchy oatmeal craisin white chocolate macadamia nut cookies I attempted to make in the toaster oven last month, I lowered the temperature from 350 to 325. The oven preheated while I mixed the ingredients. I started the timer at 5 minutes and checked every 2 minutes to 30 seconds after that to see how they were doing. I pulled up a chair and sat in front of the toaster oven window. When 22 seconds were left I tested them with a skewer to see if it would come out clean, then every 30 seconds to a minute after that. On the first batch it never did come out clean because of my fear that they would get dry. They are still good - they didn't get dry. The first batch I also topped up as much as the cups would hold because that's what was done in the original recipe.  These tiny mini donuts came out quite round.
The next batch I stayed with the preheating, 325, set the timer out right for 7 minutes, and filled the cups only to the top of the stem in the middle of the donut cups.  I think I added maybe 2 minutes total after checking.  And these I was brave and waited until the skewer came out clean - because that's living!
The mini donuts are lovely. Chocolatey, springy not cakey. A different kind of donut from what I have come to expect from gluten free/vegan/paleo/keto donut recipes, and surely satisfactory if what you have in mind is a gluten free/vegan soft fried donut.

Fresh mini donuts, first batch to the top of the pic, second batch to the bottom.

I haven't made the frosting for these yet - because I didn't feel like it?  But I probably will.