I think I've mentioned before that I worked at a real, old fashioned mom and pop bakery when I was in high school. It's where I cultivated a serious donut addiction and ruined myself for anything other than the perfect and carefully crafted bundle of fried dough, which is to say ruined myself for pretty much every other donut out there.
Now, there are doughnuts in my town that I could make do with in a craving pinch, but scoring any means getting up and leaving the house early and that's just not something I've ever really been able to muster the knack for even under the most extreme doughnut-craving circumstances.
So making my own according to my own leisurely Saturday night and Sunday morning time line became my only option:



Suddenly (or more accurately, after really a lot of messing around), I was swimming in more donuts than a two person household should ever have to face, and this was not counting the several holes that we ate practically straight from the hot oil:



Those naked ones there in front? My all time favorite donut, the one before which I become a quivering, salivating, donut jonesing freak, is the custard filled long john with chocolate icing, so while I was waiting for the shaped donuts to rise, I whipped up a batch of pastry cream and some chocolate icing to try and score a fix. So they're waiting for filling and icing. I'm calling them the pudgy johns.

Anyway, as you may have gathered from the photos, I used the Joy of Cooking yeast donut (or doughnut, which blogger spellcheck says is wrong) recipe because you can pretty much always count on the Joy. In this case, however, I must say I was slightly disappointed. Not that I have a lot of homemade donut experience (or any) but this wasn't quite what I was expecting. They were like a weird cross between a raised and a cake donut and sort of didn't really work for me. Not that I didn't manage to eat ...several.
And Boy also pointed out that they were missing that dirty fryer oil taste which I definitely agree with. Turns out a donut fried in fresh canola oil is like a soy bratwurst. It sort of hits the right notes but it's just not anywhere as good as the real deal and it makes the whole thing seem sort of pointless.

Sadly, I guess this leaves me only two options, neither of which are all that attractive. Buy a deep fryer and perfect my donut making skills or learn to love getting up early and live with the pathetic-ness that is the gas station donut. Fortunately for our waistlines, I'm likely to do neither :)