After a successful attempt at cinnamon rolls (admittedly with significant help from my mother), last Friday I thought it would be fitting to tackle the monkey bread recipe I found. Mr. D has occasionally over the years brought up how much, as a child, he liked the monkey bread his mother made. So that was the plan!
Here is the recipe we started with... I spied it on
Brown Eyed Baker.
Now I'm just going to follow this with some pretty images... things started off strong! We mixed the the ingredients as directed until the dough came together and looked smooth. The electric mixer really works wonders!
Then you want to kneed the dough for about 5-ish minutes on a lightly floured surface.
In a lightly greased bowl you want to roll your ball in the oil so it is just slightly coated and you are going to cover with a towel an place in a warm spot. This is where the yeast works it's magic. Come back in and hour and a half or so and if all goes well it will grow to double it's size.
So now you want to pat down the dough into an 8"x8" square and divide the dough in to 64 one inch balls. This is where my smarts come in! I suggest you use a sharp pizza cutter. This worked wonders for me and all the dough was cut in a matter of seconds! You can make a quick guide by lightly rolling over the dough and making an indention and then go over it again with a little more pressure and it's done! No fuss!
Roll these squares in to one inch balls.
So now we've got our melted butter and our cinnamon sugar goodness all ready. And we've also got our 'bundt' pan all buttered. What you will do is dip the dough balls in the butter and let any excess drip off. Roll the dough in the sugar mixture and align them in the pan. Just keep stacking until they are ready to go. Since we did all of this on Friday night and we were cooking on Saturday morning I covered the pan with plastic and put in the fridge until the morning.
In the morning I got up and started the oven. I made a quick powder sugar frosting (which you can find
here) and got the monkey bread out of the fridge. As soon as the oven was all heated in they go!
The smell of all of that cinnamon and sugar and baking dough fills the air. It's really heavenly! It came out looking fantastic. And I was so ready to eat. But I knew... I need to wait. To see the final product you've got to read more!
