Doh! Doughnuts

I strongly recommend any food lover to look up Alton Brown's Good Eats (I found it on youtube) where he goes through all the history and chemistry behind most typical American dishes in fun and easy-to-follow recipes. Watch it if you want to learn. Recently I watched an episode where he made doughnuts and thought it didn't look too complicated. A word of warning. This recipe yields some 40+ doughnuts, so unless you're having a party at the local police station or going out with Homer Simpson, you might want to half or even use only a cuarter of the amounts indicated here:
Ingredients:
240 ml milk
70g vegetable shortening (I used margarine)
2 packages instant yeast
80ml warm water
2 whole eggs
60ml sugar
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1.5 tsp salt
650-750g flour

Heat up milk with the margarine in until the margarine is completely melted.

Mix the yeast with the warm water in a separate bowl.

And mix the flour with the salt and the nutmeg.

Make sure the milk is not too hot by testing it with your finger. Then pour in the yeast.

Add the sugar.

Add the eggs and mix well.

Add half the flour and stir it in well.

Then add the rest of your flour and use some kind of doughhooks for kneading this very sticky dough. The recipe calls for only 650g of flour but I found that the dough was almost liquid still, so I added about another 100g. Mix until he dough starts letting go of the sides. It'll probably take from 5 minutes and upwards. The more you mix, the stronger the gluten (up to a certan point).

It will be very sticky, but should just let go of your fingers. If you add more flour he doughnuts won't be as soft and light. Cover and leave to rise for a hour or until doubled in size.

Flour your table very well. Pour out the dough and sprinkle it with plenty of flour. It's still very sticky. Fold the dough over it self 3 times and pad it down with out punching all the air out. Roll it our with a rollingpin to about 1cm thick.

Cut the dougnuts. I used a metal mold I'd made from an old can of tomatoes plus the lid from a small tube. Let them rise for 15 minutes.

Deep fry them until golden brown, then flip them over. You should only fry a couple or three at the same time or the temperature of the oil will drop and the doughnuts will start to absorb more fat.

As you can see I also fried the holes (separately). The leftover dough can be mixed, left to raise again, rolled out and then cut into more doughnuts.

I then made a simple sugar glaze, by mixing some icing sugar with vanilla and a bit of warm milk.I added it before the doughnuts were completely cooled off, which as you can see was a mistake as the icing started running. but they were delicious none the less.