Delicious Homemade Jam Donuts Recipe – Krafne/Paczki

The majority of them are filled with last year’s apricot jam, however a few are filled with my mom’s dark chocolate plum jam. Made these for a friend’s grandad, he loves homemade krafne!

KRAFNE RECIPE:

Ingredients:

1 kilogram of all-purpose flour

240 grams of sugar

1 tablespoon of good quality vanilla extract

1 1/2 tablespoons of rum

1/2 tablespoon of limoncello

30 grams of active dry yeast

140ml of oil

10 egg yolks

450 ml of milk

1 teaspoon of salt

Instructions:

Grab a large bowl and put the flour in then create a hole in the middle. Warm the milk until it’s lukewarm. In a separate bowl, add the yeast, a tablespoon of the sugar and half the milk. Mix it and pour into the hole in the flour. Let it activate while you do the rest. Using a mixer, beat the egg yolks, remaining sugar and vanilla extract until light and doubled in volume, about 2-3 minutes. Add oil, remaining milk, limoncello and rum to the egg yolk mixture and mix again. Pour this mixture directly into the flour and yeast.

Mix the dough for about 5-7 minutes with a mixer (hook attachment), or for about 15 minutes by hand until it’s combined and slightly sticky. Place the dough on a floured surface and divide it in half.

Shape the dough into balls, about 60-70g each. If you don’t own a scale, divide it in half and portion out 12-15 balls from every half. Place the balls on a floured surface with enough space between them, cover and let rest for 45 minutes.

Put roughly 3-4 centimeters (2 inches) of oil in a wide, shallow pot and let it warm up. It’s important to let it heat up slowly over medium low heat! Once the doughnuts have rested and risen, they’re ready to be fried. The top side of each donut goes into the hot oil first, meaning you gently flip them as you put them in. Fry them covered for about 60-90 seconds, uncover, flip and fry the other side UNCOVERED. This gives them the signature ring around the middle. Don’t cook more than 2-3 donuts at a time so the temperature doesn’t drop, and cook them until they are golden brown. It might take you a few tries to nail the cook time, but for me personally it never takes longer than 2 minutes per side, they cook quicker than you’d think.

Drain the doughnuts on paper towels and immediately dust with powdered sugar so it sticks, and fill them once they’ve cooled a bit.

Jam recipe coming tomorrow as my mom doesn’t like to be rushed 🙂

DARK CHOCOLATE PLUM JAM RECIPE:

Ingredients:

2 kilograms of ripe halved plums (you can chop them up finely if you don’t like chunky jam)

Half of a vanilla bean

300 grams of sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

150 grams of dark chocolate (she uses Lindt Excellence 85% cocoa dark chocolate)

1 tablespoon rum

1 tablespoon good quality cocoa powder

Instructions:

Preheat your oven to 390F / 200 Celsius. Put your washed and dried plums into a dutch oven (or any larger oven safe deep dish), sprinkle it with cinnamon, half the sugar, add in the 1/2 of a vanilla bean and rum. Mix it and bake uncovered for 50 minutes. Stir it every 10-15 minutes.

After it’s baked, if you used a dutch oven just transfer it to the stove, if not, then transfer everything to a big enough pot. Take the vanilla bean out

(Tip: let it dry out and reuse it to make vanilla sugar, just put in in a container with plain sugar and let it rest closed for a few days. Voilà, you have delicious vanilla sugar for baking).

Turn the heat on to medium high heat, add in the rest of the sugar and the cocoa powder. Let it simmer and reduce for an hour, hour and a half. You can do the freezer trick to check if it’s done.

Put a bit of jam onto a plate, stick it in a freezer for 2 minutes and if it develops a film/crust on top, it’s done.

Once you’ve reached that stage, finely chop up the chocolate and stir it into the hot jam. Store hot in sterilized jars and let it cool, it’s best eaten after resting for 12 hours.

Once a jar is opened, keep it in the fridge until eaten and we recommend using smaller jars to store it. Can be stored for months in darker, cool places (or the fridge) if properly canned in glass jars!