Eggnog Doughnuts

Looking for an easy and festive start to your busy winter morning? Try these baked eggnog doughnuts! With just a few ingredients and less than 10 minutes for baking, these eggnog doughnuts will be out of the oven and into your stomach in no time.

For any of you that lived away from home, particularly far, far away, you know that the holidays can be a time when you particularly miss things.

While living abroad, I found myself missing many of American traditions, not least of which was traditional American foods. Trying to find a carton of eggnog in Norway just wasn’t going to happen. 

So I found myself not only making my own homemade eggnog, but also all the eggnog baked goods I could think of. Maximum eggnog-ness. Included in that delicious eggnog-y line-up: These doughnuts I baked for the first time in 2014.

FYI, if you’re looking to make your own eggnog because you also can’t buy it at the store, I recommend this recipe.

How to make eggnog doughnuts

First, combine the dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in another, and then whisk together. Pour your batter into a greased doughnut pan and bake for 8-10 minutes.

Second, whisk your glaze ingredients together in a small saucepan over low heat until the glaze begins to form a crust. Whisk to break up the glaze and then start dippin’ those doughnuts!

Finally, whisk together the powdered sugar and eggnog for the drizzle, load it into a piping bag (or use a spoon) and drizzle it over your doughnuts.

Tips for making perfect eggnog doughnuts every time

• Use a piping bag to pipe your doughnut batter into your doughnut pan. This is a lot easier and less messy than trying to pour from the bowl.
• Doughnuts are easiest to remove from the pan while they’re still warm. Whenever the pan is cool enough to handle, simply turn it over and gently shake until the doughnuts come out.
• Be sure not to over-cook the glaze. Over-cooked glaze loses too much liquid and becomes too hard and thick to work with. The best way to make sure your glaze doesn’t get over-cooked is to cook it over low heat and remove it immediately once a crust starts to form. If your glaze becomes over-cooked, simply add more water in 1/2 tsp increments until the glaze breaks up enough to use.
• Why we cook the glaze: You may be wondering why we’re cooking the glaze. After all, there are lots of doughnut recipes on the web that don’t require this step. Here’s why: cooking the glaze causes a chemical reaction that results in a glaze that hardens quickly and becomes a shell (rather than a soft glaze). It’s perfect for locking in moisture and making life easier if you need to pack these doughnuts.
• This recipe will make more glaze than you’ll use, which will keep your doughnuts from hitting the bottom of the pan leaving them glaze blotchy.
• Leftovers: Baked doughnuts don’t keep well and tend to dry out faster than the fried variety. If you end up with leftovers, the best way to store them is in a paper bag. Whatever you do, don’t refrigerate them or put them in plastic.
• Reviving stale doughnuts: If you wound up with leftovers and they’ve gotten stale, no worries! You can soften them back up by microwaving them in 5-10 second increments until soft. Just watch out for melting icing.

Did you make this recipe? I’d love to hear how it went in the comments below. Better still, snap a photo and tag it on Instagram with #thesimplesweetlife. I love seeing your creations!

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If you liked this recipe, you might also like…

• Overnight eggnog french toast
• Pop tart gingerbread men
• Pumpkin spice latte doughnuts

Update Notes: This post was originally published in December of 2014 but was republished with step by step photos and tips in December of 2021.

Oh hey there! You made it all the way to the bottom. I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed this post enough to keep reading.

As you may have noticed, I update posts from time to time. This usually involves adding more tips and tricks, making improvements to the recipe or its directions and updating photos.

And as much as I love getting some shiny new photos on my older posts, I hate to erase the evidence of the journey my photography has taken over the years, as much as some of the old photos make me cringe a little.

I think it’s important to remember that we all start somewhere, and that somewhere often isn’t as pretty or polished as our later work. So in that spirit, here’s one of the original photos for this post, blasting back from 2014.