This post is an installment from the ongoing Dessert FourPlay project, in which I prepare and write about all of the desserts in Dessert FourPlay: Sweet Quartets from a Four-Star Pastry Chef by Johnny Iuzzini. For more on this project, click here.

Oh. My. God. I just loved making this so much. First off, there is the doughnut component. As in, the dessert item that brings my two favorite culinary worlds together – bread and pastry, and throws in my favorite guilty pleasure – fried dough rolled in some sort of sweet granulated substance, just for good measure. Then there’s the subtle, mellow, slightly sweet and oh, so creamy cheese filling. And, the bright flavor from confit of meyer lemon. Yes, this is sunshine and light and guilt and cheese (!) all on one plate.

A few weeks ago I saw some perfect meyer lemons at the market and I impulsively bought them with this confit in mind, because I was worried that I’d never find such perfect specimens for the rest of the citrus season. If you were wondering, meyer lemons are the darling of the winter pastry kitchen. They have intense lemon flavor and bouquet, less of the bitter white pith, and are sweet enough to avoid making the involuntary pucker-fish face when you taste them. To confit them, you cut them into very thin slices, submerge them in simple syrup, and allow them to simmer in the sugar and their own juices at a very low heat for several hours.

Next, I scooped the insides and all of the white stuff out of Kumquat halves and blanched the skins four times, draining the water each time to remove the bitterness. After the blanching, I simmered the skins in simple syrup, to make candied Kumquats, which I then minced to add to the doughnut filling.

I also prepared a pastry cream that contains one scraped vanilla bean and almost no sugar at all – a departure from the pastry cream that I’ve now prepared a bajillion times in school, that is super sweet.

I added the leftover vanilla bean pod to the bowl of my food processor and pulverized it with some sugar, which, after sifting, became my vanilla sugar.

I tossed the vanilla sugar with the zest of an orange, lemon, and a key lime and then set it aside for dredging my doughnuts.

Meanwhile, the dough that I’d prepared had finished it’s bulk fermentation, so I rolled it out and cut it into small circles. I refrigerated the circles until I was ready to use them, allowing them to come back to room temperature and finish their final proof before frying.

If you’ve never deep fat fried something at home, then you don’t know what you’re missing.

After frying, I poked a hole into the side of each doughnut and I moved the skewer around inside to hollow out the doughnut and make room for the filling (a trick I learned from the doughnut master during my internship at the Brooklyn restaurant). I piped in the cream filling, made from a blend of the pastry cream, mascarpone cheese, ricotta, and shards of candied kumquat. I should have rolled the doughnuts in the vanilla-citrus sugar first, but I didn’t, so the sugar did not evenly stick to the outside. I compensated by mounding it on top, deliciously, but not so artfully. The results were amazing. The citrus was bright and refreshing. There’s nothing like a doughnut that’s only 30 seconds out of the fryer. And the cheese filling? Unbelieveable. Not too sweet with strong notes of creamy vanilla and kumquat. Oh my. Yes.

Next up: Grapefruit Gelee ~ Honey-Ginger Ice Cream

Interested in playing along? Click to get your copy of Dessert FourPlay: Sweet Quartets from a Four-Star Pastry Chef