The kids just love the *donuts* we make in this. In reality, we are making a lot of healthy alternatives using some Sneaky Chef, and other similar recipes. Regardless, this is a nice pan that is not flimsy.

I bought this in Dec-05, and just used it for the 1st time..
This is great, but I find it hard to fill.
When your pouring your batter in, you better not take your eyes off it for a second , or you will have the batter all over.
Or is there sometype of trick to this?
Although I use to make a mess taking a large spoon to put my pancake batter onto a large double griddle.
This puts it were it belongs, no mess once you get the batter in this…
The little cup this fits into works great…

I do wish they would have made this larger though.

I payed $22.99, and I would buy it again

This is a great idea. It’s easy enough that my grandkids can make donuts. They have already tried it and liked it.

I bought this as a fun activity for me and my three year old daughter. Out of the box you get the donut maker itself (which is about the size of a small George Foreman grill) with an attached power cord, and a small instruction/recipe book (which has only one or two recipes in it). The cooking surface is Teflon-coated. It is a truly bare-bones setup but then again you don’t really need a whole lot with this.

Setup is a breeze: Just plug it in and close the lid. After a few minutes the red “heating” light goes off and you’re ready to go. Lift, fill the six reservoirs with appropriate batter, close, wait about three minutes and you’re done. So far we have made chocolate donuts from brownie mix, and yellow and spiced apple donuts from cake mixes. All came out very nice. The cake mix-based donuts cooked a little faster than the brownie mix-based ones.

Each donut is about 2″ in diameter with about a 1/2″ sized hole in it. One thing that maybe is worth noting: This is a donut machine, not a donut HOLE machine. You will not get tiny-sized “Munchkins” from this machine, only tiny donuts.

TIPS: Use a pastry bag (or a plastic bag with the corner snipped off) to fill the donut molds to avoid spills on the cooking surface. (Be careful with plastic bags or with plastic pastry bag tips; don’t let plastic touch the hot surface!) Before filling, wipe the bottom half of the donut molds with some vegetable oil on a paper towel. Use a wood dowel or wood toothpick to remove the donuts; the donuts will flip right out without any sticking. DON’T use cooking spray as it gets everywhere and is hard to clean up (see “the bad” below).

THE GOOD: Very fast donuts, perfectly sized for small children and as a novelty for adults. Easy to use and difficult to screw up; as a test I let some donuts sit for almost eight minutes and they were just fine (and only a little bit dry). It is also a potential calorie control solution; one box of brownie mix easily netted about eight dozen mini donuts, so rather than scarfing down a big fat(tening) brownie you can get a quick chocolate fix from one or two little donuts.

THE BAD: The permanently-attached power cord is a potential hazard; I would have liked to see a safety cord that pops out of the unit if tugged on accidentally. OTOH, the power cord is so short (no WAY it will reach the floor from a kitchen counter) that it shouldn’t really be that much of an issue. Also, the baking surfaces are not removable from the unit so you can’t just lift them off and throw them in the dishwasher. Then again, if you oil the surface properly (see “tips” above) nothing sticks to it and there’s hardly any clean-up.

I would dispute the claim in the description above of it being “safe for even the youngest baker”. An EZ-Bake oven is generally safe for young bakers; this, given that the cooking surface is much hotter than a light bulb and has no protection against tiny hands, is NOT the definition of safe. This is not a child’s toy nor is it safe for (unsupervised) children. This is a kitchen appliance and should be treated as such.

For an under-$20 kitchen gadget this is tough to beat. You can literally get hundreds of little donuts for very little money. However, be aware of the time investment; this machine only makes six donuts at a time and the average box of cake mix will make around 100 donuts. That’s about 16 batches per box. At about five minutes per batch (including oiling the donut wells, pouring the batter in, cooking, and removing the donuts) that’s about an hour and a half of work for a single box of cake mix. Since it does cook so fast you can’t pour batter in and then go fold laundry for awhile. You have to babysit the unit and keep it going lest you burn up your donuts (which, admittedly, is difficult to do). Just be aware of the time investment and, unless you plan on sacrificing that time to making donuts, you might want to divide up your cake/brownie mixes into smaller batches.

I’ve only had this machine for about two weeks so I can’t speak of longevity. Unless I update this review at a later date with more info, assume that the unit is still working properly.

I love this. It really works. Crunchy without the grease! We will try using zucchini or jalapenos in the cornmeal next.

Use one side of pan to bake doughnuts, the other side to bake doughnut holes. Comes with 2 recipes, one for each type. I tried the recipe for chocolate doughnuts and it turned out ok. The mixture is very much like cake batter, so I suspect any cake, muffin or brownie mix should work fine. The enclosed recipes recommend a baking time of 8 minutes, but using an electric oven cooking at 325 degrees on the middle rack, mine took 11 minutes baking time for an inserted toothpick to draw out clean.

After the demise of Morningstar Farm’s vegetarian corn dogs, we — like many other reviewers here — decided to make our own. This corn dog maker fell just short of perfect, but it was still vastly preferable to deep frying.

A few notes:
Use the ballpark length hot dogs (the longer ones). Cut in half, they’d be just about the correct size for the trays.

We had been saving our non-veggie corn dog sticks to use when the machine came. Unfortunately, the grooves on the sides of the machine where the sticks rest only allow for round sticks. The machine comes with a pack of these, or you could use bamboo kebab skewers — just not flat popsicle-style sticks, or the lid won’t close completely.

We used the included recipe that called for two boxes of corn muffin mix. Way too much batter! Fortunately we had an extra pack of hot dogs to use up the extra, but I would recommend halving that recipe for one pack of dogs (assuming you cut them in half).

The “ready” light seemed a bit temperamental. After the first batch, I waited about 10 minutes for the machine to indicate it was hot again, then gave up waiting, poured them anyway, and they were fine. Seven minutes turned out to be the magic cooking time.

The manual warns you not to overfill, but by the third batch I really started slopping the batter on top of the dogs. My conservatively and neatly filled batches never rose up to touch the top plate.

You’re probably not going to get perfectly shaped dogs like in the picture, but they’re tasty and cute and your kids will never notice if they look a bit rough.

I thankthe previous three reviewers, otherwiseI would have ordered this so-called donut machine and I would have been as disapointed as they were. Again: thanks for the reviews.
Tim

Received this as a Valentine’s Day gift and fired it up for the first time tonight. LOVED IT.

I made the “Just Plain Good” cupcake recipe from the book Small Batch Baking by Debby Nakos. I was tempted to try a cake mix, but I figured it would make dozens of mini-temptations to haunt me. This recipe was for 4 regular sized cupcakes – it made 13 mini-cupcakes (in two batches) in the device. I used paper cups and skipped the oil/cooking spray step. They turned out perfectly! The first batch were ready after one cooking cycle (under 10 min), but the 2nd batch needed two cycles – presumably because I didn’t wait for the device to completely re-heat before starting the 2nd batch.

One thing I’d point out that the manual is unclear about is how to tell when the cooking cycle is over. The “ready” light turms off at the end of the cycle. It doesn’t say that and I wasn’t sure, so I opened it prematurely – but no biggie, everything was fine.

I wish there was a supporting website where users could exchange recipes, but I’m so far delighted with this – it’s like a George Foreman grill for cake addicts!

I gave this little gem as a gift to a fellow donut lover and we used it together the first time and it was a hit from the start! So easy to use, fresh, hot, healthy whole wheat mini donuts in less than 3 minutes. Easy to clean up. I cannot say enough good things about it. It would make a great gift for any donut lover….and especially easy to use for kids.