Birthday Cake Donuts Recipe: Fun, Sprinkled Donut Treats

This month’s What’s Baking theme, chosen by Beantown Baker, was sprinkles. Bakers were invited to either include sprinkles in their batter or use them to decorate a finished treat.

March happens to be my birthday month — in fact, today is my birthday. I won’t say how old I am, but the association with sprinkles immediately made me think of birthday cake. As a child I always had a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. That memory brought another to mind: my father, who worked overnight shifts in law enforcement, would often be returning home just as I was getting ready for school. On his way home the morning of my birthday he would stop and bring me a birthday donut — always a chocolate-glazed one, my favorite.

For the What’s Baking challenge I made birthday cake donuts that combine both memories: the yellow cake flavor and a chocolate glaze reminiscent of that chocolate frosting. I adapted a recipe originally published on RecipeBoy.com (itself adapted from Tasty Kitchen). The yellow cake mix provides the classic birthday cake taste and a tender, cake-like crumb, while the chocolate glaze echoes the familiar frosting.

I used “confetti” sprinkles from a Wilton variety pack for the topping. You can substitute almost any non-chocolate cake mix — the original recipe suggests Funfetti — but I would avoid using a plain chocolate mix unless you add extra cocoa powder to the batter to deepen the chocolate flavor.