Home-made Pokémon malasadas!

I followed @jammycooks‘ recipe for Alola Big Malasadas and put my own spin on it by making them Pokémon-themed! It was my first time making anything like this, and I love the results!

More pics and details on how they were made below!

Ever since I first saw the malasada shop in the Pokémon Sun and Moon demo, I was fascinated! I had never even heard of the Hawaiin dessert before - the closest thing I had eaten was sufganiyot, a jelly-filled doughnut we eat during the Jewish holiday of Hannukah, which seems pretty similar.



Of course, the beautiful colours of the malasadas in the shop windows completely sparked my imagination. I had to make rainbow malasadas just like the ones in Alola! And of course I wanted to take it a step further by themeing them to different Pokémon!



My partner, T, and I were both excited about giving this recipe a try, and it was a real team effort!

It all starts with the dough. Neither of us had ever worked with yeast before, and we thought we might have screwed it up at first! We did tons of Googling on what temperature to bloom yeast at and what it should look like, but it turned out fine! The dough was sticky as all get out, but we managed to compact it into a ball and let it rise for two hours.

This is the difference two hours makes! Look at all that dough!

We then split up the dough and coloured it with gel food colouring! This turned out to be a challenge, as the dough was still very sticky and wouldn’t fully incorporated the dye. The result was this very cool marbled look!

We rolled out the dough and cut out the malasadas using a cookie cutter. This photo was taken after the dough to rose for another hour - that’s why you can see a clear line where the flour ends on each one!

In total, we made 4 regular, 2 yellow, 2 green, 3 orange, 3 blue, and one mini rainbow malasadas from the leftover dough!

Here they are after being deep fried! Neither of us had ever deep-fried anything before, but it went very well. I used chopsticks to turn the malasadas in the oil, which worked perfectly. I love how they look! It’s a bit tough to see all of the colours, but we fixed that!

What’s a doughnut that hasn’t been rolled in sugar?! This part was a lot of fun because we rolled each malasada in coloured sugar! We used regular granulated sugar plus store-bought coloured sanding sugar for the yellow and blue malasadas, but for the green and orange ones we made our own sanding sugar!

This was my first attempt at colouring sugar, and it was easy and fun! Just put some granulated sugar in a Ziplock baggie, then add in a few drops of gel food colouring. Mix it around a bit, and voila! I absolutely love how the green came out!

We wanted to try out a bunch of malasada fillings, so we made three! The first is the strawberry jelly filling from Jammy’s recipe, but we also made chocolate custard using this recipe, and a coconut custard based on this recipe for vanilla custard, and replaced the vanilla extract with coconut extract. The coconut was definitely my favourite!

Here’s what they looked like cut open! Using baking syringes, we filled the plain and yellow malasadas with the coconut, the orange with the jam, and blue and green with the chocolate! Some filled better than others, but they all look glorious when cut open!



The next step was decorating! All of the decorations were made entirely from white and milk chocolate. We printed out images of the Pokémon, placed them under a sheet of wax paper, melted white chocolate dyed the colours we wanted, and traced the images with chocolate. Once the chocolate hardened, we could lift the pieces off the paper and manipulate them. My partner made these adorable Kanto trio tails and bulb, and I made the Pikachu ears and the Alolan starters’ features. I really love the cartoon-y look of these!



Did somebody sneak into the photo? Who could it be? :o

Here are the Kanto starter malasadas! We cut slits into the sides of the malasadas to insert the chocolate parts, and we were really impressed by how well they held up! No breaking or tearing to be found!



The Alolan starter malasadas! We attached the chocolate parts using buttercream icing. I like that these malasadas have a very different look to them - it makes them feel very distinct from their Kanto siblings!

These malasadas took a full day to prepare, cook and decorate, but boy was it worth it! They cooked perfectly evenly, and every bite was delicious. This was a great recipe from Jammy, and it was fun putting my own spin on it!