Corn Dogs, Anyone?

With the county fair in our rear-view mirror, I was feeling the need to fry up some comfort food and drown my sorrows at having missed it. (Okay, not really - I'm just stretching for a segue. None-the-less...)

And what better deep-fried goodness than the humble corn dog? Being in possession of a deep-fryer, I thought it would be great fun to make corn dogs with homemade batter. I selected a recipe, on trusty all-recipes, read the reviews for tips & tricks, then grabbed my camera to chronicle what was sure to be a stunning success.

I was surprised to find that I had, on hand, everything I needed to make corn dogs from scratch.  

Corn dogs wouldn't be corn dogs without cornmeal.

I mixed in flour, salt & pepper, sugar and baking powder.

Then added an egg and some soy milk.

And stirred up a nice batter.

At this point, I had read some different ideas in the reviews as to how to make the batter stick on to the dogs best.  I decided to try just dipping them in (as the original recipe calls for) as well as rolling some in flour first as some Allrecipe members had suggested.

So I inserted the bamboo skewer like this...

and dipped the turkey frank in the cup of batter.

Other of the dogs got rolled in flour first, like so:

And dipped:

Without further ado, I placed the first two dogs in the basket of my deep fryer and gave them a dip.  


While they were frying, I assembled a small army of additional raw corn dogs.

Including my favorite, a half-sized dog:

This may be a good time to mention that I had no guests coming over to help me eat these, and my husband is not a fan of corn dogs either.  But what else was I to do with so much batter!?

Meanwhile, back in the fryer...

Ah... sweet success!  I just can't wait to pick those up, dab them off, and consume them whole.  (Well - maybe not the stick.)

Uh... wait a minute.

*tear*

"But they were tasty, right?"

Sadly, no.  They were not.  Even this cute little guy left something to be desired.

So this all leads me to my question: 

Does anyone out there know how to make good corn dogs at home??