Sufganiyot aka Jelly Doughnuts

I was first introduced to sufganiyot (the hebrew word for doughnuts) two years ago when a boyfriend invited me to dinner with his aunt and uncle. He failed to mention his whole family would be there, parents, siblings, cousins and both sets of grandparents. I walked into a room of 20 people I had never met already sitting down to Hanukah dinner. Luckily I had baked some driedal shaped sugar cookies so I wasn’t empty handed, but talk about awkwaaaarrd!

Anyway point of the anecdote is his aunt had made these delicious jelly doughnuts, known traditionally as sufganiyot. Fried foods are traditional for Hanukah because of the miracle of the oil burning for eight nights instead of one, and we celebrate by eating many oil rich foods, the most popular being latkes or potato pancakes. I was invited to a Hanukah latke party tonight in Brooklyn and decided to contribute by bringing my own sweet treats to counter the pounds of latke’s my friend Larry would be preparing.

My boyfriend rigged up a jelly injector with a straw and a ziplock bag which ended up working perfectly and we got these fried, filled and powdered in about 20 minutes. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon.

I think Latke Larry had the best reaction to the sufganiyot. (See exhibit A below).

Exhibit A. doughnut delight

And now.. time to make the doughnuts..

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