Cinnamon Sugar Pastries

This a simple but delicious pastry. They're crispy and sugary on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside, and the hint of cinnamon is really nice. I found a recipe for them on Food.com and couldn't wait to make them. They are so yummy, and you can eat them with other toppings too, like Nutella. They go well with coffee, tea or milk or, if you're feeling particularly sweet-toothy, hot chocolate. Mmm, sugar overload.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup of warm water
• 5 teaspoons of instant yeast
• 1 pinch of white sugar for the yeast
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt
• 1/3 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of warm milk
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup of vegetable oil
• Approximately 5 cups of white flour (plus an extra as required for kneading)
• Vegetable oil for frying
• White sugar for coating the pastries
• Cinnamon for coating the pastries

In a large mixing bowl, stir the yeast and pinch of sugar into the warm water. Leave it for a few minutes and then stir it until the yeast dissolves. Add the salt, sugar, warm milk, vanilla extract, eggs, vegetable oil, and stir everything together.

Add the flour gradually until it forms into soft dough. Knead the dough for several minutes until it becomes smooth and elastic. Feel free to add more flour than called for as you go - I found the dough really sticky and added quite a bit of extra flour.

Place the dough in a separate large mixing bowl that has been oiled. Cover it with a piece of saran wrap and a towel and leave the dough for half an hour to rise. Rookie tip - this dough rises a lot. It pretty much overflowed out of the bowl I put it in, as you can see in the picture, so grab a really big bowl to leave room for it to rise properly.

After half an hour, deflate the dough thoroughly - this is a key step to make sure the pastries are nice and chewy after they fry, and not dry and airy. Pinch off golf ball-sized pieces of dough and stretch or roll them into flat pieces. Set them aside on a floured surface.

Heat several inches of oil in a large pot over medium-high heat, if you don't have a deep fryer (which I don't, unfortunately). Once the oil is heated up properly, fry the dough pieces until they are golden. Don't fry too many at once, because you'll have to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't burn (they cook fast!) and they need enough room to fry up properly. They'll expand quite a bit. And this should probably go without saying, but I'll say it anyway - don't leave the hot oil unattended!

As soon as the dough turns golden, remove it from the oil, and let the excess oil drip off. If you want to top the pastries with cinnamon sugar (and why wouldn't you?) then toss them in cinnamon sugar while they are still warm until the pastry is coated. You can make the cinnamon sugar by mixing a 1/2 cup of white sugar with a teaspoon of cinnamon.

Yummo. That is all I have to say about that.

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