When I made these blueberry beignets the other day, Benjamin told me that "they were like pillows you eat or balloons that don't pop."

Well, there it was.

Scooped by my own four-year-old son.

Because friend, he was wholly, completely, absolutely right. They were like balloons - dough that is stretched and thin at its exterior and full of moist, air-pocketed crumb at their middle. Light for their size, pillows made of flour and sugar rather than feathers, but just as downy.

If you dust them with sugar while they're still a warm, that sugar will melt and turn to a thin glaze, shattering delicately on the tongue and dissolving almost immediately. Ethereally sweet.

And then if you dust them again with sugar, once that first glaze is set, then there's a dusty, pure-white flurry of powder to decorate your lips as you bite into the crust. As they cool, the centres firm up and the texture is developed, the structure of the open crumb giving a slight, gratifying resistance to the tooth. Then of course there are those pockets of blueberry that burst and run rivulets of inky juice throughout. A bit Jackson Pollack meets Julia Child.

Consider these the elevated incarnation of those powdered doughnuts from the carnival.