A lot of people list rectangular pizza or nachos as their favorite school lunch. While those are delicious, I liked mini corn dog day.

Mini corn dogs are great, they’re like regular corn dogs, but nugget-sized and without that dangerous stick. I had found a really great store-brand version of mini corn dogs and would grab a box occasionally for those nights I needed a quick and easy supper or just wanted a dollop of nostalgia.

Unfortunately, I think those mini corn dogs have been discontinued. Not only can I not find them here in Aberdeen, but a few quick searches of the big box store’s app shows that they’re not available at other locations in our region.

There are other brands of mini corn dogs available, but I really like these and they were very inexpensive.

Of course, full-sized corn dogs are an option, but I like the mini ones. They’re easier to portion out than the large version.

So I set out to make my own.

When I could find the frozen mini corn dogs, I loved to just pop them in the air fryer, so I wanted to find a version that works in the air fryer.

An air fryer or an oven doesn’t handle batter very well, that’s one place a deep fryer has a leg up on the newer technology. But dough works very well in the air fryer.

So finding a corn dough, versus batter, was key.

Food blogger The Baker Mama has a version of corn dough that comes together like a pie crust. Half flour, half corn, with honey to sweeten and a little bit of milk to mix it all together, the dough works very well.

It was easy to work with and rolled out very well.

The Baker Mama’s recipe uses hot dogs cut in half and sticks. My version, I quarter the hot dogs and left out the sticks.

My general rule for converting regular oven recipes into air fryer recipes is to keep the temperature the same or as close as it will get with my machine and to cut the cook time in half. Using this method, my first batch got a little dark, so round two, I cut it to six minutes.

The second time I added a slip of parchment paper to the air fryer, because the corn dough was a little soft and sunk into the grates in the basket.

While this version of mini corn dogs is a little more work, they’re very tasty and a little bit healthier.

Recipe adapted from The Baker Mama. (https://thebakermama.com/recipes/baked-corn-dogs/)