a donutCake donut

A ring of thick batter, not dough, raised by baking powder or soda rather than yeast and dropped straight into the fat from a depositor. It is denser, shorter and smaller than a raised ring — cake rings run 24 to 28 grams against the raised ring's 38 — and it takes sugar, cinnamon sugar or a heavy icing better than it takes a thin glaze.

The cake ring appears in American cookbooks in the 1830s, after pearlash — a potash refined for baking — became easy to buy, and it is the ring that industrialised. Yeast wants hours and a warm room; chemical leavening wants a mixer and a clock. When doughnut shops were streamlining production in the 1920s and 1930s, most bakers went the cake route because baking soda behaved the same way every morning and machines could be built around it.

The structural difference is in the flour as much as the lift: cake rings use cake flour, around 7 to 8 percent protein, which is why they crumb rather than pull.

The fat numbers depend on who you ask, and the two accounts do not agree. One puts cake at about 20 percent oil against yeast's 25; another puts cake at 20 to 25 percent and yeast at 25 to 35. Neither names a laboratory. What both agree on is the direction: the raised ring spends longer in the fat and comes out carrying more of it, and the cake ring makes up the difference with shortening mixed in before it ever gets there.

Beat a soft batter — cake flour, sugar, eggs, shortening, milk, baking powder. Rest it. Drop rings into 190 to 198 °C fat through a depositor, or cut them from a soft rolled dough. Fry roughly 90 seconds, turning once; one account has commercial cake rings out in 30 to 45 seconds at 191 °C. Sugar or ice them after they cool a little, because a hot cake ring drinks a thin glaze and goes soggy.

Cake is the dough that holds a flavour — buttermilk, sour cream, blueberry, chocolate, cider — so a shop that runs both doughs usually runs its specials on this side of the case.