Baked Pumpkin Donuts

Meet your new favorite fall treat – moist, spiced pumpkin donuts covered in a sweet cinnamon-sugar coating! They cook in just 10 minutes for a quick and tasty fall breakfast or dessert. So good, they’ll disappear fast!

Reasons you’ll love this recipe

• Decadently delicious! These homemade pumpkin spice donuts are the best way to start your day. Packed with warm pumpkin flavor, I love them with a hot cup of coffee or tea. They are lick-your-fingers good! 
• Quick and easy to make: These come together so easily and quickly. There’s no rising time and no mixer needed! You can have these on the table in just about 20 minutes total!
• All the fall flavors: With the warm spices and major pumpkin flavor, this would be the perfect breakfast for Thanksgiving morning, or any morning that you really want to treat yourself!

Ingredients you’ll need

These soft, moist pumpkin donuts are vegan, dairy free, and absolutely irresistible. They require just a handful of simple ingredients: Here is everything you’ll need to make them:

• Flour: For fluffy, tender donuts, I like to use all-purpose flour.
• Baking staples: Since there is no yeast in this recipe, the baking soda and baking powder are what helps the donuts rise and keeps them from being dense.
• Salt: Just a pinch to enhance the flavors.
• Pumpkin pie spice: This spice mix is usually a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, all-spice, and ginger. You can use store-bought or try my homemade pumpkin pie spice recipe!
• Maple syrup: For the perfect amount of sweetness.
• Milk: Use any milk you’d like to add moisture to the batter.
• Vanilla extract: Adds warmth and sweet flavor.
• Pumpkin puree: The pumpkin puree is a key ingredient for real pumpkin flavor! Make sure to use 100% pumpkin and not pumpkin pie filling, which has added spices and sugar.
• For the topping: Spray the donuts with cooking spray, so the delicious cinnamon and sugar coating sticks.

Variations and substitutions

• Flour: Alternatives to all-purpose flour that should work great are whole wheat pastry flour, or to make them gluten free, use a gluten-free 1:1 all-purpose flour.
• Pumpkin spice: You’ll need 1/2 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice, if you don’t have any, you can sub with ground cinnamon or use 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon, a generous pinch of ground nutmeg, a generous pinch of ground ginger and a small pinch of ground cloves or allspice.
• Milk: While any milk will work, be sure to use a plant based milk like almond milk to keep these vegan friendly.
• Glaze: To make glazed donuts instead of cinnamon-sugar, stir together 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 tsp vanilla extract and 2-3 tsps of milk to thin. Once donuts have cooled completely on a wire rack, you can drizzle them with the glaze or dip them into the glaze.

How to make this recipe

This pumpkin donut recipe is very similar to my vegan pumpkin muffin recipe which means that it’s an easy one bowl recipe. You’re welcome. Plus, these are baked, not fried, for those who want to make homemade donuts but don’t want the hassle of frying. But not to worry, they’re just as tasty!

We’re going to start by sifting together the dry ingredients and then gently mixing the wet ingredients right into the same large bowl.

To make for an optimally smooth and pretty donut, I put my batter into a baggie, cut off one corner, and then pipe the batter into the donut pan.

One of my favorite parts about this recipe is that it only takes the donuts TEN quick minutes to bake. While the donuts cool on a wire rack, make the sugar topping. In a shallow bowl, mix together the sugar and cinnamon (or pumpkin pie spice). Once donuts have cooled a bit, lightly spray with cooking spray and then toss them into the cinnamon sugar until fully coated.

Helpful tips

• Measure your flour accurately: Whenever you are baking, it is important to measure the flour correctly to get tender and moist donuts, cupcakes, cookies, muffins or cakes. To measure it correctly, spoon the flour into the measuring cup and (without shaking the cup) use the straight edge of a butter knife to level off the flour.
• Don’t over mix the batter! Once you add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, don’t over mix! Gradually stir until all the ingredients are just combined. Over mixing can result in dense donuts!
• Piping donuts into the pan: To make it really easy to transfer the batter to the pan, spoon the dough into a piping bag or large zip-top bag with one corner snipped. Then, easily pipe the dough into the wells of the pan.
• Using canned pumpkin: A 15-ounce can of pumpkin puree holds nearly 2 cups, so you will have about 1 1/2 cups leftover. Use it to make a healthy pumpkin smoothie, or pumpkin oatmeal cookies. To keep it for later, transfer the leftover pumpkin puree into an airtight container and keep it refrigerated for up to one week.

Frequently asked questions

Storage recommendation

If you have leftover donuts, cover them and store them at room temperature for 1 to 2 days or in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Decorating idea

I’ve played around with these donuts a bit and made them into actual pumpkins. I simply added a few drops of orange food coloring to the icing and then used a pecan as the stem. This is optional but I also used some green gel icing from the store to create little stems. SO CUTE!