Warm & Gooey Monkey Bread Recipe -

With the holidays comes everything warm, sweet, and gooey, right? The crisp air (well, what we had for a couple days anyway) called for hot chocolate and something warm and gooey for breakfast. If I’m going to be honest, though, it was breakfast, snack, and dessert! No matter what time of day we nibbled on it, monkey bread was our go-to choice this past week. While you may have made it many times before, I have a few sprinkles of special ingredients I use in my monkey bread recipe to give it a little extra something!

Here’s What You’ll Need:

Ingredients for Monkey Bread:

note: this is for a smaller helping but can easily be doubled for a larger portion

1 can Pillsbury biscuits
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup salted butter
2 tbsp vanila extract
2 tbsp cream cheese
1/2 cup
sugar
2 tbsp cinnamon

Preparation:

Grease a 9 inch round cake pan or any small bundt cake pan or similar
Preheat oven to 360 degrees
Pull apart or cut each biscuit dough round into 4-6 pieces
In a small bowl, combine the sugar and cinnamon
Place dough pieces into sugar mixture (a handful at a time) and coat well. Place in your coated pan as you finish.
In a small saucepan, heat butter, brown sugar, cream cheese, and vanilla. bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat once smooth (you will only need a couple minutes).
Drizzle your gooey sugar mixture over your dough.
Pop the pan into the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Adjust time if you’d like it a bit more caramelized.
Remove, cool, and serve!

Great Baking Activity for the Kids and Grandkids

This is the perfect baking recipe to try with your kids and grandkids! The dough will probably be their favorite part. When I taught in pre-k years ago, it was hard to keep the kiddos from pulling the dough apart into 1,000’s of small pieces, but they tasted just as delicious! Let them have fun and pile the pan high with monkey bread dough balls!

monkey bread dough balls in sugar mixture

Larger Portions and Pans

As I mentioned above, I used a small, shallow cake round, as I was only baking for three of us. Traditionally, I’d just a bundt cake pan and double the recipe. You’ll get a beautiful monkey bread tower and all those tiny pieces you let the kiddos create will have a pretty cool pattern when you remove it from the pan!

Reheating

For a quick re-heat, pop it on a plate and warm in the microwave for 30-45 seconds. If you’d like to get that gooey, caramelized texture back, I stick mine pack in the pan and broil for 3 minutes in the oven. Just keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn!