I know, it’s not the greatest photo in the world – I have to work on my food photography, but aside from the poor quality of the image, this “Monkey Bread” turned out awesome! How awesome? My son David, who is now 16 and still enjoys our cooking and baking adventures, devoured most of it the next day.
Yes, a bit too much white flour and sugar in the diet that day, but we don’t do it often, so a treat is a treat. I’m a pretty lucky dad in that my son loves to eat great healthy food including just about every vegetable that exists. So there’s no guilt here when we make something like this and he has been a glutton over it.
We made this completely from scratch. A lot of monkey bread recipes call for refrigerated pre-made “biscuit” or Pillsbury doughs, but I never buy that stuff. Almost everything we cook and bake is from “scratch” and you’ll not find much canned processed or refrigerated processed foods in our house.
Monkey bread is pretty simple to make, although you do have to allow for time during which the dough rises. The nice thing about it as well is that you can use a variety of flavours for the “sauce.” We decided on cinnamon this time, but you could make a chocolate or a caramel sauce. Or combine different things.
You will want to have a Bundt pan to make monkey bread, although before we got one, we improvised using a regular baking tray. But really, a bundt pan just works perfectly.
Here’s what we did:
Monkey Bread Dough From Scratch
1¼ cups room temperature milk
2 teaspoons instant dry yeast
¼ cup white sugar
1 large egg at room temperature
¼ cup butter melted
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
Monkey Bread Sauce
2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 cup brown sugar packed tightly
1 cup butter melted
Making The Monkey Bread – First Preparation
Monkey Bread Dough
In a large bowl, add the flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Mix together.
Mix the milk and melted butter in another vessel, whisk in the egg.
Add the liquid to the flour and mix together. When the dough is thoroughly mixed, removed from the bowl and knead for about five minutes on a lightly floured surface. After kneading, form the dough into a ball.
Clean the bowl you mixed the dough in so you can lightly oil the sides before putting the ball of dough back in. This ensures the dough as it rises will not stick to the sides or bottom of the bowl.
Cover the bowl with plastic cling wrap and allow to sit in a warm place for 1 – 2 hours.
Monkey Bread Sauce
While the bread is rising, melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the brown sugar and cinnamon. Mix well. Keep the sauce warm until you are ready to use it.
Making The Monkey Bread – Putting It Together & Baking
Preheat oven to 375F
After the dough has risen (almost doubled in size), punch the dough down.
Lightly grease the sides and bottom of your bundt pan.
Drizzle some sauce into the bottom of the bundt pan, making sure it is completely covered.
From the dough, make smaller balls, about one inch in diameter and place them in the bottom of the bundt pan to form the first layer. Pour a little more sauce over the first layer.
Continue in the same manner, with more layers of the 1″ diameter balls of dough in layers, making sure that all the balls are touching.
Drizzle sauce over each layer as you add them. When you are finished, drizzle the remaining sauce over all the dough balls in the bundt pan.
Put in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and allow to cool for about 5 minutes. Put a large plate over the top of the bundt pan, turn upside down, allowing the bread to “drop out” of the pan as you remove it. If you greased the pan well enough, nothing should have stuck to the sides.
And there you have it – it will be yummy to pick off pieces of the monkey bread and they should be like little mini-cinnamon buns. Be careful though – the temptation to try them right away is almost always given into, but they will be hot!
Enjoy with coffee or whatever you like. Enjoy on it’s own! Serve with vanilla ice cream. However you have it, it will taste very good!
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