Mardi Gras Beignets
Use purple, green, and yellow sanding sugar to create colored powdered sugar to decorate these puffy, delicious, and simple to make Mardi gras beignets!
Servings: 40 beignets
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups lukewarm water
- ½ cup granulated sugar
- 1 envelope active dry yeast
- 2 eggs slightly beaten
- 1 ¼ tsp salt
- 1 cup evaporated milk
- ¼ tsp vanilla paste
- 7 cups bread flour
- ¼ cup shortening
- Nonstick spray
- Peanut oil for deep-frying
- 2 tbsp each of sanding sugar in green, purple, yellow
Instructions
- Mix water, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl and let sit for 10 minutes.
- In another bowl, beat the eggs, salt, vanilla, and evaporated milk together. Mix egg mixture to the yeast mixture in the mixing bowl of a stand mixer. Add 3 cups of the flour to the yeast mixture and mix on low speed til just combined.
- Cut in the shortening and continue to mix while adding the remaining flour. Scape the sides with a rubber spatula as needed.
- Remove dough from the bowl, place onto a lightly floured surface and knead with lightly floured hands until smooth, about 1-2 minutes. Spray a large bowl with nonstick spray. Put dough into the bowl and cover with plastic wrap or a towel. Let rise in a warm place for at least 2 hours.
- While the dough is rising, use this time to turn your sanding sugar into powdered sugar. Use a clean spice grinder to pulse your sugars one at a time until the consistency is powdered sugar, about 5 pulses or 10 seconds of grinding. Set each color aside in a plastic container with a tight fitting lid for later, and clean the grinder between colors.
- Preheat oil in a large frying pan over medium high heat.
- Add the confectioners' sugar to three separate plastic containers with tight fitting lids, separated by color, and set aside.
- Roll the dough out to about ¼-inch thickness and cut sides to form a rectangle. Cut the dough into 1-inch squares.
- Deep-fry, flipping once until golden on each side, less than a minute. As the beignets are fried, drain them for a few seconds on paper towels.
- Decorate in one of two ways, either by shaking beignets in each individual color of powdered sugar, or by using your fingers to sprinkle a stripe of each sugar color on the beignets. The latter method uses less sugar if that's your goal.