Fill doughnuts like a professional with some tricks.
Doughnut and pastry shop employees make filling doughnuts look easy, and it can be if you take note of some tricks of the trade. Piping filling into doughnuts is not difficult if you pay attention to the ingredients and supplies used in the process. These same filling techniques apply to filled cupcakes and other pastries like eclairs. Soon you will be turning out filled doughnuts the envy of your local bakery.
Tip Size and Shape
When filling doughnuts, instead of an expensive machine, just use a pastry bag with a plain, round tip. Use a tip with at least a 1/4-inch wide opening to allow the thick filling to easily flow through and into the doughnut. Look for pastry bags and piping tips in cooking supply stores and on the Internet. There are specialty piping tips for filling pastries, but unless you make filled pastries often, the simpler, round tip will suffice.
Filling and Doughnut Choice
Use a thick pastry cream filling for your doughnuts or a thick jelly filling. If the filling is too thin, it will leak out of the opening in the doughnut, but if it is too thick, it will not flow enough to be piped into the doughnut. Chill the filling for at least four hours or until very cold to keep it thick, improve the flavor and avoid it from melting when piped into the room temperature doughnuts. Use yeast-risen doughnuts without a hole in the center. The middle of the doughnut is needed to hold the filling, and cake doughnuts do not have the large holes of yeast-risen doughnuts to hold the filling.
Filling Method
Insert the tip of the pastry bag into the side of the doughnut and apply gentle pressure to squeeze the filling into the doughnut. The natural crevices in the doughnut will accommodate the filling, but as soon as you feel the filling begin to push back on the piping tip, release the pressure on the pastry bag and pull it out of the doughnut. This prevents the doughnut from being filled too much and bursting.
Alternative Filling Method
Filling doughnuts does not require a pastry bag and tip for piping the filling in. A recipe from the Food Network Kitchens fills cut, uncooked doughnut halves and then sandwiches the halves together, sealing them with egg white. The filled doughnuts are then deep-fried as usual. This filling technique skips the filling step after frying the doughnuts, but the filling should be chilled and set before adding to the top of the cut doughnut dough.
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