Easy, delicious baking with only a handful of cheap ingredients is what we need right now.
And elephant ears, those staples of summer fairs and amusement parks, can be made right at home when all the actual fairs are canceled. (You might also know these as fried dough, doughboys, pig ears and other descriptive names, but they shouldn’t be confused with funnel cake.)
The Girl Who Ate Everything’s recipe for Elephant Ears ends up resembling the two floppy ears of an elephant. (The other kind you may have seen at carnivals is a big hunk of sugary fried dough the size of a plate.)
For the two-eared version, start with puffed pastry you can get in the frozen section of your grocery store and lay it out on a sugared surface with a pinch of salt mixed in. Roll out the dough a bit and add cinnamon and sugar on top.
Then you gradually fold the dough in on itself until it becomes one long and layered piece. Cut it into individual slices and bake.
After baking, these bits of pinwheel dough puff up to form two adorable little ears. The Girl Who Ate Everything says they are good warm or at room temperature so you could make these last, or just gobble them all up.
These elephant ears closely resemble “palmiers,” a French cookie.
To make plate-sized elephant ears, Allrecipes.com has a classic take where you make your own yeast dough, fry it and cover it with butter and cinnamon sugar.
Mr. Food’s version uses premade bread dough cut up into smaller pieces.
You could also try out a cookie version from Martha Stewart by grinding up toasted pecans with the cinnamon-sugar mix.
Tortillas can also be turned into elephant ears. Bitz & Giggles coats them in butter and cinnamon sugar and bakes them in the oven. But you can also deep fry them too, which might keep your kitchen cooler than heating up an oven.
Will you try out this fair favorite at home?