Baked Sakura Doughnuts Recipe

Aren't these baked sakura doughnuts so cute? They're super easy to make too.

I used two different 'sakura sources' for this: sakura blossom powder and soluble sakura leaf powder. The blossom powder is made with the actual flowers and doesn't dissolve fully in water, while the soluble leaf powder does (making the latter more ideal for drinks and icing).

I found the sakura blossom powder on eBay, where you can find a few different sellers offering it. The powder I got from anything-from-japan.com, which is also where I got the crunchy sakura flakes for decorating.

The blossom powder is already coloured, so the sakura doughnuts themselves don't need any additional food colouring to turn them bright pink. The leaf powder is, however, colourless, so I did add a drop of pink food colouring to the icing.

You can also see how I make these on my YouTube video:

Ready? Let's go.

(Makes about 8–10 doughnuts.)

Ingredients for Doughnuts:

100ml milk
1 egg
25g unsalted butter, melted
50g caster sugar
115g self-raising flour
2 tbsp sakura blossom powder

Ingredients for Glaze:

2 tsp soluble sakura leaf powder
2 tbsp milk (approx.)
150g icing sugar

Ingredients to Decorate:

50g white chocolate, melted (no need to temper)
Crunchy sakura flakes
Icing flowers

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and lightly grease your doughnut pan (no need to grease if it's silicone).

2. To make the doughnuts, lightly whisk the wet ingredients together. Then place the dry ingredients in a bowl, and pour wet into dry, stirring with a balloon whisk until just combined (don't over stir or you'll get tough doughnuts).

3. Fill a piping bag with the batter, and fill your moulds about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way full (you may need to do two batches depending on the size of your pan). Bake for about 12–15 minutes, and leave to cool completely.

4. To make the glaze, stir the sakura leaf powder into the milk until fully dissolved, and then stir it gradually into the icing sugar until you have a very thick, dippable textured icing.

5. Dip the top surfaces of the doughnuts into the icing and leave to drip and dry on a cooling rack.

6. To decorate, put the melted chocolate in a piping bag and snip off the very end to create a small hole. Drizzle the chocolate over half of each doughnut, sprinkle over the sakura flakes and place an icing flower on each one.

Enjoy, and have fun.