Monkey Bread

I have two friends who are getting married later this month. I haven't seen the bride-to-be in almost a year, and we were planning a nice get together before the big day. Since she was so kind to make dinner for me, I wanted to make a nice dessert for her. What kind of nice dessert? I searched for days. Okay, not days, but for a little while. I wanted something that wasn't too hard to fix, but something that wasn't a very common dessert either. I've never made monkey bread, or even had monkey bread. I guess I thought it wasn't very common. The dough can be made by hand like I did it, or you can just cut up instant biscuits into fours. Another tip is putting the cinnamon and brown sugar in a freezer bag and adding the balls and shaking everything up together instead of dipping them. You can also pour the melted butter over the balls in the pan instead of dipping them. Either way, it should all taste the same: delicious.

I LOVE kneading dough.

I used a springform pan. Next time I'll use a different bundt pan since this one didn't add a lot of texture to the top of the monkey bread.

Ingredients:

Dough
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, *divided (2 tablespoons softened, 2 tablespoons melted)
1 cup milk, warm
1/3 cup water, warm
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 package or 2 1/4 teaspoons rapid rise, instant or bread machine yeast
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for work surface
2 teaspoons table salt

Brown Sugar Coating
1 cup packed light brown sugar or turbinado
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 stick butter, melted

Cream Cheese Glaze
3 ounces cream cheese, softened
3 tablespoons powdered sugar, plus extra if needed
2 tablespoons milk, plus extra if needed
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Heat oven to 200 degrees. Once it reaches 200, turn oven off.

For the dough: In a measuring cup, mix together water, milk, sugar, yeast, and melted butter.

Mix flour and salt in a large bowl. Make a well and then add milk mixture. Stir together using a wooden spoon until it becomes hard to stir. Then use your hands and knead until mixture becomes smooth and forms into a nice ball, about ten minutes.

Coat a large bowl with nonstick cooking spray. Roll dough ball around in the bowl so all sides of dough are coated in oil. Cover with plastic wrap and stick in the warm (but turned off) oven for about an hour, until dough has doubled in size.

Brown sugar coating: Melt butter in one bowl. Mix cinnamon and brown sugar in another (or in a bag).

Form the bread: Once dough has doubled, lay out on flat surface and pat out to form a nice rectangle. Cut the dough into 64 squares and roll into unified balls.

Dip balls into melted butter and then brown sugar mixture. Layer in bundt pan. Cover pan with plastic wrap and place in warm oven and wait until balls are 1 to 2 inches from top of pan, about 50 to 70 mintes.

Once balls have risen, remove pan and heat oven to 350 degrees. Once oven has heated, place pan back in the oven without the plastic wrap and cook for 30-40 minutes. Start checking after 30 minutes to see if the balls are begining to brown. Once the balls are a nice caramel color, the monkey bread it finished.

Let cool for five minutes and then remove from pan. Let cool for another ten minutes and then add cream cheese mixture.

Cream Cheese Icing: Beat cream cheese and powdered sugar until smooth. Then add milk and vanilla and beat some more. Take a taste and add more powdered sugar and milk until you meet your satisfactory taste. Just about a tablespoon or two more of each.

Cover the top of the cake with cream cheese mixture, allowing some to drip off the sides.

Serve warm.

Pretend there's a photo of the monkey bread with cream cheese icing. I was in such a hurry I left to see Carlie as soon as the monkey bread was glazed.