Daring Bakers Oktober Challenge: Banana Crunch Doughnuts (filled with blueberry jam) and a family recipe

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

At my region this kind of deep-fried stuff is called "Pfannkuchen" or "Berliner" (called after our capital of course). In carnival it's a kind of tradition to fill some of them with musturd - so if you're not lucky you'll find a very "special" one. During the last years you can also buy ones filled with egg nogg or chocolate but I prefer the traditional version with cherry or strawberry jam, covered with granulated sugar. Some use sugar glaze, but that's not how I like them. In my family we have a special recipe for "Quarkbällchen" what are small balls with a dough containing raisins and quark. I'll give you the recipe here, but I haven't made them in a while, so I unfortunately have no pictures what they are supposed to look like.
I have made doughnuts before, especially because I adore the ones from Dunkin Donuts and wanted to recreate them. Unfortunately it's a 3 hours drive to Berlin which is the next place I can get the original ... My maple sirup version (yeast dough) was not bad but far from the taste I expected. So I decided this time to go for dough without yeast. Some time ago I found I recipe by Tartelette, one of my favourite blogs which was using bananas. I saved it amoung my 'I have to bake/cook this' list but never came to the point actually doing it - until now. As I wanted to make a filled and 'normal' version I decided for blueberry jam filling - you have to know that my favourite doughnut at Dunkin Donuts is the blueberry crunch doughnut ...



Banana doughnuts with blueberry jam filling