I made apple-cider doughnuts in my air fryer, and they were a messy delight

While these might be considered a fall treat, I'd enjoy them year-round if I could ... and now that I'm in possession of an air fryer, I can.

In general, I find my air fryer to be a very convenient and quick way to prepare food, although I didn't have much success with my air-fryer brownies. But, I wasn't deterred from trying to make other sweet treats.

So, armed with this recipe from The Kitchn, I decided to try my hand at making apple-cider doughnuts in an air fryer.

The recipe called for milk, apple cider, sugar, flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, light brown sugar, and butter.

If that seems like a lot, you're right. Half of this will get reduced when it boils on the stove.

The hot apple cider made my kitchen smell wonderful, and made me even more excited for my doughnuts.

Specifically, here's what I needed:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

This proved to be more difficult than I thought. The eight tablespoons, or one stick, of cold butter was definitely not cold by the end, making it hard to grate it without my hands slipping around. I must've washed my hands three times during this process, just to make them less greasy.

I used my hands to combine the butter with the dry ingredients until it almost looked like sand. I don't think this was as "pebbly" as the recipe called for, but I had to give up when the butter was entirely saturated with the dry ingredients.

After it was down to a little over one cup of apple cider, I let it sit in the fridge for five minutes to cool it down. Then, I created the well in the dry ingredients.

I added my one cup of cooled, reduced apple cider and 1/2 cup of cold milk to the mixture.

I used a spatula to combine everything, which definitely was an arm workout. But when all the ingredients were combined, my kitchen was starting to smell mouth-wateringly good, so I didn't mind.

I ended up using a huge cutting board that my parents had in their kitchen. I wiped it down and proceeded to cover it in flour, so the dough wouldn't stick everywhere. Then I added more flour to the top, so when I started folding the dough, it wouldn't stick to itself.

The recipe said to spread the dough into an even, 1-inch thick layer, and fold it onto itself six times until the dough was "slightly springy." Trust me when I say flour was getting everywhere.

After folding and folding, it was time to spread the dough one last time. This was the final product.

Not pictured: the huge mess I'd made with all the ingredients, all the paper towels from my numerous hand-washing pauses, and the multiple bowls for all the ingredients. Plus, a thin layer of flour had settled into everything.

This is a doughnut cutter, a great gadget for anyone who regularly makes doughnuts. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people, so I was forced to make do with what I had. And what I had was a glass that was around the size of a doughnut.

In retrospect, I needed either a wider glass or a smaller shot glass for this to work.

As you can see, they look a little noodly.

I have this GE combined air fryer and toaster oven.

I was a little concerned that the doughnuts would be crunchy as they looked a little well-done.

While the doughnuts had been frying, I melted another stick of butter in one bowl, and combined cinnamon and sugar in another for the coating. After the doughnuts had cooled a bit, I dipped them in the butter bowl and then rolled them around in the cinnamon sugar, one by one.

The cinnamon sugar didn't stick as well as I'd hoped, so my stove was covered in cinnamon sugar.

These doughnuts just weren't fluffy. They tasted amazing — I was really able to taste the ginger and apple cider in the dough, which complemented the cinnamon sugar quite nicely — but the texture wasn't right.

This batch had already been on the crunchier side, and when I left them out to settle, they had gotten even harder.

Now this was what I had wanted. This batch was cakey and moist, and the cinnamon sugar stuck better as well. My family, aka my taste-testers, agreed this batch was better.

Overall, the second (and third and fourth batches ... this recipe really made a lot of doughnuts) turned out much better. The taste and texture were greatly improved by the thicker cutouts and the immediate transference to Tupperware.

I've made air-fried doughnuts before using premade biscuit dough, and while they were good, they just didn't taste like doughnuts. These were the perfect solution to my year-round apple-cider doughnut cravings, and it didn't involve dunking dough into a vat of oil.