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Gluten Free Lemon Glazed Baked Blueberry Donuts

Name: Gluten Free Lemon Glazed Baked Blueberry Donuts
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 15 min
Ingredients: 1/4 cup oat milk; 1 tsp cider vinegar; 1 tsp lemon juice; 1/4 tsp vanilla extract; 3 tbsp melted coconut oil (cooled to room temp); 1/3 cup honey; 1 cup oat flour; 1/4 tsp sea salt; 1 tsp baking powder; 1/2 cup blueberries (if frozen, thaw to room temp); lemon glaze (see below); lemon zest (optional)

Raise your hand if you’ve been stress baking and eating! Both of my hands are WAY up. The struggle has been real over here. The first week we were home, I made chocolate chip cookies, muffins, and more… the good old fashioned full sugar and fat way. Now that I know I am going to be in my home for a long time to come, I’m trying to take a little control back and baking healthier recipes using cleaner ingredients. This past weekend, I made lemon-glazed blueberry donuts, and I am so excited to share the recipe with you today. If we’re gonna be at home baking and eating, we may as well try to make it a little bit better for us, right? Today I am joining several other bloggers who are also sharing their spring recipes. You can find all of their links at the bottom of this post, and special thanks to Krista at The Happy Housie for organizing all of us.

Last week I told Chris I had a spring recipe to create and asked for his ideas because I wanted to make something he’d eat, too. Our older kids are such picky eaters that I knew I couldn’t count on them to eat whatever I concocted unless it was some version of carbs with cheese. Chris suggested spring rolls, or seared tuna, or seaweed salad, all of which are delicious (I especially love making spring rolls since a neighbor taught me years ago!) but with the current state of affairs, I wanted to come up with something you could make with easier to find items, or things you already had. My own pantry is always full of baking supplies, both gluten free versions and not, my freezer always has blueberries, and lemons are generally an easy commodity. I asked what he thought about lemon glazed blueberry donuts instead, and he said that sounded good to him! Normally he would have said, “Why did you even bother asking me?” I am not sure what overcame him. 😉 I am famous for asking him questions as if they are open ended and then saying, “No, how about this?”

Fruit, especially berries and lemons, are quintessential spring flavors, and I love the combination of lemon with almost any berry. Lemon raspberry, lemon blackberry, lemon strawberry…. Yes, please! I am so missing my local farmer’s market right now, but happy that I was able to come up with a recipe featuring some of my favorite farmer’s market flavors.

You can find the easy to follow recipe at the bottom of this post, but here are the basics you will needed as well as a little more detail to the steps I took and mistakes I learned from.

Materials Needed

donut baking pan
cooling rack
cooking spray
medium mixing bowl
small bowl
measuring spoons and cups
whisk
spoon for glaze

Ingredients

oat milk
cider vinegar
lemon juice
vanilla extract
coconut oil
honey
oat flour
sea salt
baking powder
blueberries
turbinado sugar
lemons for juice and zest
corn starch or arrowroot powder

Instructions

First things first, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. These donuts don’t take much time to make at all, so you’ll be ready to stick them in by the time it’s ready. Also prepare your donut pan by spraying with cooking spray, and then lightly flouring. Note, I did not flour mine, and I had a couple stick (which is why my photos have 4 donuts. 😉 ). Learn from my mistake and go ahead and lightly flour yours with some oat flour to keep them gluten free.

Whisk together your first 6 wet ingredients, and set aside. Then in a separate small bowl mix together your dry ingredients (everything up until blueberries- under blueberries is all for the glaze). Add your dry ingredients to your prepared wet and gently stir together until combined. Fold in your blueberries. If using frozen like I was, make sure you’ve thawed the berries first! Do not overmix or your batter will turn blue. Here is what mine looked like when I was done mixing in the berries. You can see that the color started to bleed a little so I simply stopped stirring.

Pour batter into the 6 spaces of your prepared pan. You can pour, spoon, whatever works for you! I spooned mine in, and it was slightly messy but really not too bad. I once tried using a cake decorating kit to fill a donut pan and I don’t recommend that method… FYI. It seemed like a good idea, but it just oozed out and made a huge mess.

Bake for 15 minutes, until golden brown and bounces back to finger touch. They will look like this coming out of the oven.

Let cool for about 5-10 minutes in the pan, then gently remove and place on cooling rack. I used a small rubber spatula to loosen all of the edges before flipping the pan over to let them fall out.

While they are in the oven, prepare your glaze. You’re going to combine turbinado sugar (I use this because it is unrefined and a little cleaner), lemon juice, and oat milk and whisk or stir with fork until as much of the sugar as possible dissolves, about 2 minutes. Next run the mixture through a sieve, collecting the liquid in a bowl below. This method helps get all of the remaining sugar granules out so your glaze is smooth. Next, add in the corn starch to thicken it a bit. The glaze will be a light brown in color, but it seeps into the donuts and really doesn’t matter that it isn’t white. It tastes amazing!

Using a small spoon, drizzle the glaze onto your donuts.

While the glaze is still wet, zest lemon peel right onto the donuts to garnish. This step is totally optional, but definitely makes them look a little prettier in my opinion, and lets people know to expect lemon flavor.

After that, they’re ready to eat and enjoy! I used my grandmother’s old green glass cake plate that I love to use for special events, and as you can see I glazed and garnished my donuts right on that place. To make them a little fancier, I added some spring blooms from our yard.

I took some photos of them looking lovely, and then…

… I ate two. I have big feelings right now, and my eating reflects that. At least on the sunny side, these are a little less guilt-inducing than regular donuts. It’s basically like I just had a green smoothie, but without the green, protein powder, and with sugar instead… thank goodness, it’s unrefined sugar. 😉

Here are the easy to follow recipes for you, and find the links to all the others below these.