How To Make Battered and Fried Sweets At Home Street Fair Food Week
After the making of our funnel cakes yesterday, we sent the men of the house out for some, well for lack of a better phrase, junk food. We wanted to try our hand — just once! — at making all those other insane street fair sweets you see so often these days.
So upon their return with their bags filled with candy bars, Oreos, Twinkies and more, we went to work.
Many of the recipes we found for frying sweets up in this manner called for a simple pancake batter. But we loved our funnel cake mix so much, that we went ahead and used it instead. It mixes quick, doesn’t slide off the sweets once dipped and wasn’t too heavy or thick. Here’s how we went about it.
Fried Sweets
makes 40-50 snacks depending on size
1 recipe funnel cake batter
Assorted sweets, frozen for at least 1 hour prior
• Candy bars (we preferred miniature ones)
• Filled sandwich cookies
• Filled pastries
Peanut oil
Powdered sugar
To start, you’ll need a roll of paper towels, a wet towel and a dry towel. This process goes even quicker than the aforementioned funnel cake making, so you’ll want to be ready to drain the oil from your foods, wash your hands and dry them all in a hurry.
We set our oil to 360°F and mixed up our batter. We kept it in a Pyrex bowl with a handle and kept it uncovered. Set out plates with paper towels, ready to catch the grease. Unwrap your snacks (you are more than welcome to make your own, more healthier versions, but part of the love of street foods is eating things that you know are ultimately bad for you right?) and set them out on a plate ready to go.
With one hand, dip your snack into the batter, roll to coat and scrape excess batter on the side of bowl. Place in fryer gently. We found it easiest to drop 6 Oreos in the batter bowl at once so they could go into the fryer in rapid succession. You can use tongs for this part, but we’re more the “get dirty hands on” type and we’ll stick by our guns and say using our hands worked better than tongs would have any day of the week. Just make sure to keep one hand dry at all times.
Flip foods that don’t flip themselves after 30-60 seconds. Things like candy bars and Twinkies seemed to flip themselves right over and we didn’t have to bother. If your deep fryer has a basket, keep it moving so the batter doesn’t stick to the wire mesh.
Remove from oil, drain excess oil and place on paper towels. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and enjoy while still warm!
We have to say the mini candy bars were our favorite hands down. Dipped Oreos seemed like a waste of some good double stuff (which isn’t a sentence you get to say very often), but the candy bars melted right through and became little nuggets of goo… in that good way! Baby Ruth’s were the favorite of the night and became a soft soup of tasty heaven.
We did try our hand at battering full size candy bars and besides being awkward to coat fully, they seemed like a huge mouthful of food. We preferred the ratio of breading to chocolate on the smaller bite size candies.
If you try it at home, leave us a comment and let us know what your favorite was? Strawberry Twinkies? Homemade Whoopie Pies? The options are endless!
(Images: Jenni Brown)