MAISON DE KENNEDY

Kiwi Cream Doughnuts

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ (5/5) Tested by Cass — 2 hrs 40 min · Makes 10

A proper Kiwi cream doughnut is a soft, oven-baked enriched bun — pale gold on top, powdery white with icing sugar, split down the length and filled with a thick rope of freshly whipped cream and a proper dollop of raspberry jam. Not fried. Not mock cream. Not custard. Just soft bread, real cream, tart jam and sugar snow. The kind you buy warm from the bakery on a Saturday morning and eat standing on the footpath.

Ingredients

Dough

• 500 g Strong Bread Flour — or high-grade
• 60 g Caster Sugar
• 8 g Fine Salt
• 7 g Yeast — instant dried, or active dry (must be bloomed, see notes)
• 250 ml Full-Cream Milk — warm, ~35°C
• 2 Eggs — room temperature
• 80 g Unsalted Butter — soft
• 1 tsp Vanilla Extract

Filling & Finish

• 350 ml Fresh Cream — 35%+ fat, cold (see notes)
• 40 g Icing Sugar — for the cream
• 1 tsp Vanilla Extract or Paste
• ~200 g Raspberry Jam — seedy and tart
• Splash Milk — for a light wash, optional
• Plenty of Icing Sugar — for dusting

Method

1. Dry mix: Flour, sugar, salt and yeast in a stand mixer with the dough hook. Keep salt and yeast on opposite sides of the bowl until mixed — direct contact kills yeast.
2. Wet in: Add warm milk, eggs and vanilla. Low speed until it comes together into a shaggy dough, ~2 minutes.
3. Knead: Medium speed for 6–8 minutes until smooth and elastic.
4. Butter in: A tablespoon at a time with the mixer running. It'll look broken and greasy — keep going. It comes back together after 4–5 minutes and turns silky, glossy and slightly tacky. Total mix time ~15 minutes.
5. Windowpane check: Stretch a walnut-sized piece between your fingers. If it goes thin and translucent without tearing, you're done.
6. First rise: Round into a ball, lightly oiled bowl, covered. Warm spot 1–1½ hours until doubled. Active dry yeast runs slower — budget 1½–1¾ hours and judge by doubled, not the clock.
7. Divide: Tip out onto a lightly floured bench and divide into 10 equal pieces, ~90 g each. Use scales.
8. Shape: Flatten each into an oval, fold the long edges to the middle, roll up tightly like a mini Swiss roll, then roll under your palms into a smooth 10 cm sausage with tapered but not pointy ends. Surface tension gives you the rise.
9. Prove: Two parchment-lined trays, seam-side down, 4–5 cm apart — they grow substantially. Cover loosely and prove 45 min to 1 hour until puffy and springy. Press gently: it should slowly spring back and leave a faint fingerprint.
10. Bake: 190°C / 375°F conventional, no fan — fan browns the tops too fast. Optional very light milk brush. 13–16 minutes until pale gold on top, deeper underneath, internal 88–92°C. They should sound hollow tapped underneath. Tent with foil for the last 5 minutes if colouring too fast.
11. Cool completely on a rack before splitting. Warm buns melt the cream instantly.
12. Whip the cream: Cold cream, icing sugar and vanilla to stiff-ish peaks — holds its shape when piped but still glossy, not grainy. Stop before it turns to butter. Into a piping bag with a large plain or star tip (~1.5 cm).
13. Split: Slit each cooled bun lengthways along the top with a serrated knife, about ¾ of the way through. Hinge, don't split. Open gently.
14. Pipe: A fat generous rope of cream down the full length. Don't be shy — a proper one is more cream than bread from the side.
15. Jam: A bold blob along the middle of the cream — one central dollop that oozes, or two or three smaller ones.
16. Dust: Transfer to the serving plate first, then dust heavily through a fine sieve, then a second light dust once plated and jammed. Don't be delicate.
17. Eat within a few hours. They don't keep — the cream weeps and the sugar dissolves overnight.

Notes

• Cream: 350 ml is the calibrated amount. The original 500 ml (~50 ml per bun) pipes a proper café mountain. 350 ml (~35 ml per bun) suits our preference for a more restrained cream-to-bun ratio. Personal calibration, not a rule.
• Dust in two passes. Heavy pass through a fine sieve after transferring to the serving plate — transferring knocks sugar off — then a second light dust once plated and the jam is on. Fixes the uneven coverage you get dusting before transfer.
• Yeast type matters — read the packet. If it says instant, rapid rise, bread machine or quick yeast, no bloom needed. If it says active dry, you must bloom it first or they won't rise: warm 100 ml of the milk to 35°C (wrist-warm, not hot), stir in 1 tsp of the sugar, sprinkle the yeast over without stirring, wait 5–10 minutes for foam. No foam means dead yeast. Then add the bloomed mixture plus the remaining 150 ml milk, eggs and vanilla together as your wet ingredients, and ignore the keep-salt-and-yeast-apart step.
• Why bread flour, not plain. These need to be pillowy but structurally strong to hold a lot of soft cream without collapsing. High-protein flour gives chew-free fluff and lets the crumb pull apart cleanly when split. Plain flour works but goes cakey and tears rather than pulls.
• Jam matters more than you think. Supermarket ultra-sweet jam disappears against the cream. You want real tartness and visible seeds — Anathoth Farm, Barker's, or a good farmers' market one. The jam is the whole contrast.
• The pale-crust trick. The point is that soft, powdery, almost-white top that takes icing sugar beautifully. Minimal browning. Skip egg wash entirely for the palest result, or milk-only for a very light shine. Save egg wash for bread rolls.
• The bakery-window look. Kiwi bakeries pipe the cream so it stands proud above the split, not tucked inside. Slit shallower, pipe higher. The jam sits on top like a bindi, not buried. Icing sugar goes on last over everything, jam included, then partially melts into it for that pink-through-white streak.

Variations

• Overnight dough — after the first rise, fridge overnight. Shape cold in the morning, prove 1½ hours, bake. Better flavour, easier timing.
• Boysenberry jam — the other true-Kiwi choice. Less tart, more perfume. Equally correct.
• Half batch — halves cleanly for 5. Uses 1 whole egg and 125 ml milk.
• Freeze the plain buns — bake, cool completely, freeze in a bag. Thaw at room temp 1 hour, then split and fill fresh. Never freeze filled.
• Cream stabiliser — serving 3+ hours later, whisk 1 tsp cornflour into the icing sugar before whipping. Holds the pipe longer without going grainy.

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