“Mardi Gras” (Fat Tuesday) is a very popular Christian tradition in France that occurs between the month of February and March usually. During Mardi Gras people enjoy a very specific kind of doughnuts called Bugnes.
So to celebrate this tradition I am sharing with you the recipe as well as the technique to make those yummy pastries essentially made from sugar, fat and eggs.
Cedric’s Bugnes
Make 35-50 doughnuts
Ingredients
- 500 g of flour
- 500 g of sugar
- 100 g of butter
- 4 eggs
- 1 packet of vanilla sugar (~8 g)
- 8g of baking powder (or 1/2 packet of French “Levure alsacienne”)
- one bottle of canola oil
Main cookwares and baking utensils
- 1 large bowl
- 1 rolling pin
- 1 frying pan
- 1 serving dish
Making the dough
1) Beat the eggs in the bowl. Add melted butter, sugars and yeast.
2) Add the flour little by little until you get a dough that don’t stick and that you easily spread.
Making the doughnuts
3) With the rolling pin, take a slice of the dough and spread it to form a rectangle on a flat, floured surface.
4) Cut out stripes about 1 1/2” to 2” wide. Dive the strips into rectangles, approximately 4”
5) Twist the rectangles as follows:
a) With a knife, make a 1 1/2” long slit in the center of each rectangle, lengthwise
b) Take one of the rectangle’s small sides through the hole to shape some kind of bow. Great, this is one Bugne!
Cooking the doughnuts
6) Heat oil in a frying pan (oil should be about 1 1/2” deep) until boiling hot
7) Place a couple of Bugnes at a time in the oil. Be very careful! and make sure the doughnuts won’t touch each others.
8) After a few seconds, the Bugnes should come back up to the surface. Flip then once and after a few extra seconds, take them off the frying pan and place them into your final serving dish
9) Sprinkle icing sugar on top of the Bugnes once they have cooled.
Cedric’s tips
- If you don’t have vanilla sugar, you can substitute it with a few drops of vanilla extract in the batter, or even brown sugar.
- My mum loved orange flavor but I didn’t. So if you are like my her, feel free to add 1 table spoon of orange blossom water to the batter to give to your Bugnes this extra taste :-)
Bon appétit!
Cédric
