Pillsbury Banana Cream Crescent Donuts

The Cronut Craze: A Pastry Lover's Solution

Oh, doughnut lovers, you've heard of it but chances are you haven't tried the genius hybrid between the croissant and the donut - the cronut. The craze has hit New York and people are waiting upwards of two hours in line to buy a limit of two. There is even a black market for these things at a 700 percent markup, so what's a pastry lover like me to do when you can't get your hands on the latest craze? We're going to make them at home using the de Pillsbury Crescent dough.

To start making our DIY Pillsbury Crescent Donuts, we'll begin by opening up a roll of original Crescent dough that comes eight to a pack. We'll flour the board just a little bit so we don't have any sticking issues. Now, let's twist out our dough because these are crescent rolls and they're perforated in triangles. What we're going to do is go back and kind of mend the seam, basically just fusing these little triangles back together to get one big slab of dough.

Next, we'll fold this into thirds to create more layers and then roll it again. At this point, we'll just roll it out until it's big enough to accommodate our donut cutter. We're using two round cutters today - one is about three inches in diameter, and the other is slightly smaller. Let's start cutting out our donuts by centering our little donut hole on the dough and gently pressing down.

Now that we've got all of our donuts cut out, it's time to fry them. We'll heat up some oil in a deep frying pan until it reaches about 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the oil is hot, we'll carefully place our donuts into the oil using a spider or skimmer. Letting these go for about two-and-a-half to three minutes on either side will get us nice and golden brown. These are going to puff up right away, showing off all those beautiful layers we worked so hard for.

While our donuts are frying, let's prepare our banana cream filling. This is something I make anytime I'm making one of two end products - banana cream pie or banana pudding. Today, we're infusing it with banana flavor. Your goal here is just to get it between those layers and have this nice silky smooth pastry cream.

To amp up the banana flavor, I've processed 1/2 cup of banana chips with half a cup of granulated sugar, creating a beautiful banana sugar that I can roll my donuts in. Of course, the last step with any good donut is a little bit of glaze or icing - and all we have here is just a basic glaze made with milk and powdered sugar.

Now it's time to assemble our cronuts by slicing them in half using a serrated knife. This will reveal the crispy exterior that sounds amazing when you take that first bite, I love when things come out crispy. Here are our gorgeous cronuts - you can see all those flaky layers and the banana cream studded throughout. There you have it, folks - Pillsbury banana cream crescent donut! You saw how easy it is to make this, so go ahead and try making your own version.