Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day With a Rainbow Donut Party

We’re took Skittles’ advice this St. Patrick’s Day: We’re tasting the rainbow with these colorful, rainbow funfetti baked donuts. Though they’re not actually rainbow flavored (that’s a thing, right?), and the dough isn’t multicolored (like the rainbow donuts from Moe’s Doughs in NY), the prismatic icing will catch your eye and and your Insta’ followers’ likes. Make a dozen, and then line them up in a rainbow for your St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Don’t worry about complicated dough recipes or messy deep fryer disasters — these baked donuts are super easy to make. All you need is a donut pan and some funfetti cake mix. Let’s get to it.

Ingredients:

For the cake:

— funfetti cake mix

— 4 eggs (The recipe on the box calls for three eggs, but I added an extra to make them more dense.)

— 1/3 cup oil

— 1 cup water

For the icing:

— 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

— 3 Tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

— 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

— pinch of salt

— 5-6 Tablespoons whole milk

— red, yellow and blue food coloring

— white sprinkles (pearls, jimmies, etc.)

Set your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and grease your donut pan.

Add your funfetti cake mix, water, oil and eggs to a stand-up mixer with the paddle attachment. Mix until combined.

Either use a pastry bag or a plastic bag to pipe the batter into the pan. Leave about 1/3 inch at the top so the batter has room to rise.

Bake them for approximately 19-20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

While they’re baking, you can start the icing. I used Cooking Classy’s recipe, but found that mine needed quite a bit more milk.

Add powdered sugar, vanilla, melted butter and salt to a stand-up mixer with the whisk attachment. Mix it slowly to avoid a giant cloud of powdered sugar.

Once the ingredients are mixed, start adding the milk one tablespoon at a time until you get a smooth consistency. In order to glaze the donuts, the icing needs to easily drizzle off of a spoon, but it also needs to form a bit of a crust on the top. It should be shiny right after it’s mixed, and then get slightly dull almost immediately when sitting untouched.

Now comes the fun part — making a color palette of icing! Separate your icing into small bowls (large enough for the donut to fit inside), and then add a few drops of color. Mix and keep adding color until you get the hue you wish to achieve. The more color you add, the darker they will get. Remember, red and blue makes purple, red and yellow makes orange and blue and yellow makes green. As you add more or less of each color, the shades will vary.

To ice your donut, place it face down into the icing.

Then lift it up and to the side and circle your wrist to get the drips to land on top. Depending on the consistency of your icing, it will either harden as is or it will slightly drip down the sides and then harden. If you want to add sprinkles, be sure to do so while the icing is still wet.

These donuts would look so good on a dessert table!

Match them up with a colorful napkin for even more rainbow goodness.

You might even make one that has edible gold glitter on top to represent that essential pot of gold.

Stack them up for a leaning tower of donuts look.

This post is leprechaun approved.

What other rainbow desserts are you making for St. Patty’s Day? Show us your project by tagging us on Instagram + using hashtag #iamcreative!