I Made Apple-Cider Doughnuts in My Air Fryer


Here are the ingredients I needed for my apple-cider doughnuts.

all the ingredients for the donuts

All the ingredients for my apple-cider doughnuts.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


The recipe called for milk, apple cider, sugar, flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, light brown sugar, and butter.

The first step was to measure out the two cups of apple cider needed.

apple cider pre-reduction

Two cups of apple cider.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


If that seems like a lot, you’re right. Half of this will get reduced when it boils on the stove.

The instructions were to bring the apple cider to a boil and and reduce it to one cup.

boiling the apple cider

Boiling the apple cider.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


The hot apple cider made my kitchen smell wonderful, and made me even more excited for my doughnuts.

While that was going on, I combined all the dry ingredients.

dry ingredients

Clockwise: Baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, ground ginger, light brown sugar, and flour.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


Specifically, here’s what I needed:

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

To add a little texture, I was instructed to grate a stick of butter.

grating butter

Grating the butter.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


This proved to be more difficult than I thought. The eight tablespoons, or one stick, of cold butter was definitely not cold by the end, making it hard to grate it without my hands slipping around. I must’ve washed my hands three times during this process, just to make them less greasy.

The next step was to combine the butter with the dry ingredients until the mix was the “texture of small pebbles.”

pebbly dry mix

The dry ingredients with the butter.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


I used my hands to combine the butter with the dry ingredients until it almost looked like sand. I don’t think this was as “pebbly” as the recipe called for, but I had to give up when the butter was entirely saturated with the dry ingredients.

Here’s where it started getting really messy. I had to take the dough out of the bowl, find a large flat surface, and coat it in flour so the dough wouldn’t stick.

the dough on the cutting board and flour

The dough with the flour.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


I ended up using a huge cutting board that my parents had in their kitchen. I wiped it down and proceeded to cover it in flour, so the dough wouldn’t stick everywhere. Then I added more flour to the top, so when I started folding the dough, it wouldn’t stick to itself.

Here’s me and my new pride and joy: the flattened dough. It was ready to be made into doughnuts.

selfie with the dough

The “springy” dough.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


After folding and folding, it was time to spread the dough one last time. This was the final product.

Not pictured: the huge mess I’d made with all the ingredients, all the paper towels from my numerous hand-washing pauses, and the multiple bowls for all the ingredients. Plus, a thin layer of flour had settled into everything.

To get the cinnamon sugar sticking to the doughnuts, the recipe told me to dunk the doughnuts in butter, and then coat them in cinnamon sugar.

coating the doughnuts

The dipping process.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


While the doughnuts had been frying, I melted another stick of butter in one bowl, and combined cinnamon and sugar in another for the coating. After the doughnuts had cooled a bit, I dipped them in the butter bowl and then rolled them around in the cinnamon sugar, one by one.

While these were tasty, they weren’t perfect. For my next batch, I tried something different.

skinny doughnuts

The skinny doughnuts.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


These doughnuts just weren’t fluffy. They tasted amazing — I was really able to taste the ginger and apple cider in the dough, which complemented the cinnamon sugar quite nicely — but the texture wasn’t right.

This batch had already been on the crunchier side, and when I left them out to settle, they had gotten even harder.

For the second round, I used a larger glass to cut out the doughnuts, making them a little thicker. They turned out just right.

thicker doughnuts

The perfect doughnut.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


Now this was what I had wanted. This batch was cakey and moist, and the cinnamon sugar stuck better as well. My family, aka my taste-testers, agreed this batch was better.

Even though these doughnuts created a small tornado of sugar, cinnamon, and flour in my kitchen, I’d make them again in a heartbeat.

donut selfie

My lovely doughnuts.

Gabbi Shaw/Insider


I’ve made air-fried doughnuts before using premade biscuit dough, and while they were good, they just didn’t taste like doughnuts. These were the perfect solution to my year-round apple-cider doughnut cravings, and it didn’t involve dunking dough into a vat of oil.



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