Mardi Gras is not a holiday that was oft celebrated in my home. It’s not that we had anything against it, but if you’re not from New Orleans, it’s just easy to forget about. However, in Germany, where my mother is from, Mardi Gras is known as Fasching. It’s celebrated in a similar way. People dress up in costumes and there are parades and lots of food. But there is one food in particular that is associated with Fasching: Krapfen. They are essentially just jelly-filled yeasted doughnuts, but they are magical. They may be better known to Americans as Berliners, but the same style of doughnut is made all over Europe for Fat Tuesday. For a list of all their different names, refer to the Wikipedia article. 

My grandmother used to make them every year for Fasching with her homemade blackberry jam, but I was never at her house when they came fresh out of the fryer. Instead, she would freeze them and we would reheat them in the toaster oven. They were delicious, but since they were originally fried, the reheated ones were always a little stodgy, giving them the fond nickname “hockey pucks.” Making the hockey pucks got to be too much of a pain for my grandmother, so she stopped making them, and it was several years before I had one again, this time in Salzburg, Austria where I was visiting my sister around Fasching. Austria is, as my mother puts it “apricot-mad,” so they fill their Krapfen with apricot jam. These were almost fresh from Cafe Konditorei Fürst and they were amazing. I was happy never to have another Krapfen again because I thought I had reached the zenith. I was wrong.

Sadly, this year I was not in Salzburg for Fasching. Instead, I was home in the miserable cold of February. It was the day before Mardi Gras I was talking to my grandmother about making Krapfen, and I joked that maybe come tomorrow I’d just suck it up and make them myself. Fast-forward to me the next day desperately hunting down a frying oil I could use in good conscience. I landed on Trader Joe’s Sunflower Oil. 

Krapfen making was not easy. It didn’t help that the recipe I was half following had a typo in it and that I was simultaneously making a dinner of shrimp and grits to celebrate the New Orleans side of Mardi Gras. Stress levels were not at their best when dough took a little longer to rise than expected or when my sister may have made the oven a little too high while we were trying to help the yeast rise, or when my 1970s Super Shooter refused to shoot out the jam.

However, the end result was, dare I say it, life changing. If you have never had a doughnut fresh out of a fryer, I highly recommend it. They were so light and fluffy, they just melted in your mouth. There is also something particularly special about yeasted doughnuts. There’s an extra depth of flavor you don’t get from any other kind. I filled them with my uncle’s homemade blackberry jam, which was just the icing on the cake. Whether I will ever make them again, is yet to be determined, but I have a year to recover.