Doughnut

All the joy of a freshly-fried funnel cake could be yours right now.

As the name suggests, West Africa’s most popular form of fried dough is essentially a delectable fried pillow of airy dough.

Crisp, golden brown youtiao is a staple at the Chinese breakfast table.

These ring-shaped mochi doughnuts use mochiko and tapioca flours to get a little extra chew and bounce.

These milky little doughnuts are a burnished bronze on the outside, white and cakey inside, and soaked to the core with delicately flavored rose syrup.

Glaze citrusy, baked doughnuts with a nutty brown butter icing and sprinkle with large crunchy granules of coffee-infused sugar for a sweet bite that hits all the marks.

These sugared doughnuts are craggy and crunchy on the outside, tender and moist on the inside. Apple butter (not sauce!) is key to their texture and flavor; look for it alongside jams and jellies in the supermarket, or at farmers’ markets, or make your own.

Use this easy, no-cooking-necessary glaze to ice doughnuts and cupcakes, or drizzle over anything else you want.

You will never eat a better doughnut than the one you make yourself, still hot out of the oil.

You'll impress everyone with these flaky, puffy doughnuts.

Krapfen These light doughnuts will be the hit of any autumn or winter brunch. The recipe doubles easily for a crowd.

Cinnamon, cardamom, and freshly ground black pepper lend warm spice to these sweet fritters.

Anyone who's ever dropped into a local bakery for a morning snack can testify to the appeal of coffee and a doughnut. Here, yeast doughnuts with a touch of cinnamon get an extra jolt of flavor from a sweet espresso glaze.

The warm, sweet spices of masala chai are magic in these homemade doughnuts.

The classic treat gets a double dose of cider goodness from a syrupy reduction that is both mixed into the dough and used for the shiny glaze.

Cold brew concentrate lends robust coffee flavor to these crispy cake doughnuts.

We have to thank the geniuses at Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland, Oregon for inspiring these sweet dreams intertwined with a strip of thick, salty bacon, all drizzled with a glaze made with real maple syrup. It's almost too good to be true. You may need to clear your schedule for a month or two so you can make these EVERY weekend.

I love doughnuts, but I really love malasadas. And ever since I visited Hawaii, I got up on this game. One day, a friend of mine showed me how he did it growing up in Oahu: take a pack of the Pillsbury biscuits and fry them, then toss them in sugar. "DUDE!!!!!!" I said. Try it and you'll see. You too will say, "DUDE!!!!!!!!!" and deplete your local grocery store of Pillsbury biscuit dough just to make these.

Peruvian Doughnuts These doughnuts were inspired by the ones at Bolivar, the restaurant in New York City where I got my first professional experience cooking Peruvian food. The picarones at Bolivar were made with sweet potato and served with an anise-scented syrup; at Chifa we use pumpkin purée and serve them with a fragrant infused honey that features star anise as well as bay leaf and cinnamon. Any leftover honey can be used anywhere you would use regular honey; store it in an airtight container at room temperature.

I know deep-fried doughnuts don't strictly count as baking, but I've included them here because they start with a dough, and they taste too good to leave out, especially made with a chocolate ganache filling instead of the ususal jam.

Cookbook author and food photographer Lara Ferroni created this classic doughnut recipe exclusively for Epicurious. For Ferroni's doughnut-making tips and more recipes, see our complete guide to homemade doughnuts. We've included two glaze options, sugar and chocolate, but these doughnuts are terrific on their own or simply dusted with confectioners' sugar. If your kitchen is on the cold side, an easy way to create a warm place for the dough to rise is to turn the oven on to 250°F, and set the bowl of dough or the baking sheet of doughnuts on top.

Cake doughnuts are fried, not baked, at your local doughnut shop. But this recipe bakes up just as delicious, and cleanup is far easier, not to mention a bit less guilt-inducing. This batter also bakes up beautifully in an electric doughnut maker. Note: To get the proper doughnut shape when baking cake doughnuts, you do need a doughnut pan with a rounded bottom to each cup and a post through the middle. Baking them on a flat baking sheet will result in flat-bottomed half-doughnuts. If you don't have a doughnut pan, you can make the same batter and bake it in a muffin tin for doughnut-flavored muffins. The batter also works great with a mini-muffin pan for bite-size treats.

Making these subtly spiced cake doughnuts is so easy and quick. They are the perfect pairing with coffee, in the morning or even for dessert.

There are two kinds of crullers: hand-twisted cake doughnuts, which are more akin to maple bars; and French crullers made with pâte à choux, which are lighter than air, with all sorts of nooks and crannies to hold onto their light honey glaze. These crullers, one of my family's favorites, are the latter. Note: Undercooked crullers will collapse while cooling, so observe the first one and if this happens, increase your frying time (and check your oil temperature) for the rest.