I’ve been super busy this week preparing for our bake sale.  I was pretty excited to do two recipes.  First was a good standby, chichi dango.  I’ve made it before and it’s a great sell for any bake sale.  I played around with the colors and made it purple, pink and white.  Was really cute.  Well sort of.  I was told that maybe I should put white in the middle next time since the purple and pink kind of blended together.  Then, since chichi dango is super sticky, I had to cover it in potato starch.  Well the potato starch then masked the colors even more.  It’s okay, the taste was great so I’m fine.

My next recipe was this lemon mochi doughnut recipe I found online.  Sounds intriguing right?  Well as you can judge from this blog title, misery follows:

Cute yah?  I got a great pan as a gift a while back and finally got to use it.  Aren’t they cute?

Here’s the batter right before I put it in the pan…

Here’s a picture of them cooling on a rack…

Well at first glance, you can see they are not shaped like donuts.  I didn’t have a mini donut pan and didn’t have time to order a new one on amazon.  I called around stores about one but they were all pretty pricey so when I found my flower pan – woohoo!  I figured both pans served out the same amount of servings (12) so I gave it a try.  Well the batter smelled great, I baked them longer since it was a different pan and checked for doneness with a toothpick and they looked great out of the oven.  I let them cool overnight.  This morning, I gently dusted each one with powdered sugar and placed them in their own packaging.  They were a pretty good hit at the bake sale.

Well the end of the bake sale came and I decided to try the last one.  Oh the horror!  The flavor tasted great in terms of a great lemon flavor…but the texture.  Oh the texture was so gritty.  I felt terrible to have sold them at the sale.  And also terrible that some people knew I made it.  Blah!!  I don’t know what went wrong, honestly.  I followed the recipe to a T but maybe it was the pan.  Maybe it wasn’t meant to be in this shape and baked up weird.  I just checked my Pam cooking spray and I used the butter with flour spray which also made for baking, not sure if that added to the chalky gritty flavor as well.  I hope people didn’t think this thing was raw because I did check for doneness.  All in all, this was an epic fail for me.  Sorry I didn’t get a pic of it in its final packaged state!  I learned a valuable lesson today, do not try new recipes for a bake sale.  lol…I will stick to recipes I have made before and made well before selling it at the fair.  Sorry to anyone who had this today.  I hope to god you got a good batch (I made 2) and I just got a bad one.  Well if anyone is interested and maybe have a mini donut pan, feel free to make this recipe!  I’m sure the person who posted it had great results.

http://www.yoo-eatz.com/Lemon-Mochi-Doughnut-Recipe-18233395