These Are the Easiest Doughnuts You’ll Ever Make

I’m not usually one for cooking shortcuts that involve prepared ingredients, but there are some recipes that just have too many involved parts. Making doughnuts has always been one of those recipes. You have to make and shape the dough, and you might have to let it rise — all before you deep-fry!

Then I stumbled upon the easiest doughnut recipe ever and just had to try it. Can you believe it involves just two ingredients? Read on to find out what they are!

To make cheater doughnuts at home, all you need is a tube of prepared biscuit dough and oil to fry it in. That’s it. Yes, you read that correctly — biscuit doughnuts!

One little can of biscuits contains a world of delicious doughnut possibilities. You can fry the biscuits whole and fill them with jelly, custard, or pastry cream, or you can go the traditional route and stamp out rings. Whichever way you go, the dough is easy to work with and it just takes one minute of frying time before you’re eating hot-out-of-the-oil doughnuts.

Biscuit doughnuts definitely taste different from regular doughnuts. While they do have a light texture, they have a bit more chew to them than traditional yeasted doughnuts. In terms of flavor, there’s a bit of a savory aspect to them, but nothing that a quick roll in powdered sugar or cinnamon-sugar can’t fix.

These doughnuts can definitely satisfy a doughnut craving and are actually quite fun to make since the only hard work you have to do is the frying part.

To make these cheater biscuit doughnuts, pop open a tube of biscuits and separate each biscuit onto a baking sheet sprinkled with a little flour. For filled doughnuts, you don’t have to do anything and they’re ready to fry. If you’re going to make doughnuts with holes in them, I found that a big metal pastry tip is just the right size and has a sharp enough edge to cut out the holes. Make sure to keep the dough cold while you heat up the oil.

Heat up about an inch of vegetable oil in a cast iron skillet or Dutch oven until it reaches 350°F (I really recommend using a thermometer here), then drop the dough in and fry until puffed and golden-brown, about 30 seconds on each side. To flip them, I found the best tools are actually wooden chopsticks — hold a chopstick in each hand and gently nudge each doughnut over.

After the doughnuts are done, remove them to a wire cooling rack for just a few seconds to let the excess oil drip off, then dust with powdered sugar or, my personal favorite, cinnamon-sugar.

For the filled doughnuts, poke a hole in the side of the doughnut with a paring knife and then use a piping bag to squeeze your filling inside.

And don’t forget about those doughnut holes! Fry them up as a cook’s treat!

I tested and fried these doughnuts in the communal area of the building where I live and ended up sharing the results with interested people walking by. They were devoured in just a few minutes, and people were amazed that they were made out of canned biscuit dough. Give it a try and you might be pleasantly surprised too!