Cinnamon Roll Monkey Bread Recipe

Cinnamon coated bread that’s nothing to do with monkey but it’s still called one? Well, we’ve heard about stranger things but those were not this tasty!

No one knows where monkey breads came from. Well, no one knows where the name come from as the dessert itself came from the heart of Europe with Jewish immigrants during the XIX.century. First it was sold only in Jewish pastry shops but as time passed so grew the pastry’s popularity across the States and soon spilled over to the whole of the U.S.

Originally it was, and still is, called Arany Galuska which is an unpronounceable phrase for anyone who didn’t suck the language in with the mother’s milk. It loosely translates to golden dumplings referring to the desserts color and shape.

The reason this name or any other alternative didn’t take hold, apart from being unpronounceable and impossible to remember, is because at the same time there was a very similar dessert on the pages of recipe books.

The original monkey bread looked exactly like the Arany Galuska but it wasn’t a dessert as didn’t have any sugary cinnamon spilled over it. It was a Southern savory snack something like pizza monkey bread.

As probably more people liked sweet dessert, due to our sugar addictive nature, than savory snacks soon the sweet topping took over the old school variation to the extent that nowadays monkey bread is almost exclusively referred to as a sweet thing.

What monkey bread exactly means though no-one really knows. It’s lost in the obscurity of yellowed pages recipe books. Some try to argue that it’s referring to the way people eat the dessert that is being a finger food and likening it to the way monkeys would eat it.

Others argues that the pastry itself resembles a pack of monkeys sit tight together as are the balls of the monkey bread.

As there aren’t references in cookbooks let alone written parchment or craved stone tables, the origin of the American sour monkey bread is unknown. Not as many would wonder about it since we can pour cinnamon and sugar over it.

The dessert itself shares many similarities with other yeast breads like the cinnamon pull apart bread or with the cinnamon roll. It’s not a big surprise as it uses the same dough and same ingredients with much of the difference in the shape of the pastry only.

Sure, enough we know for a long time that shapes matter as much as different ingredients in perceiving the various flavors. So, making a round shaped monkey bread will provide a different experience than a layered cinnamon filled bread or a rolled-up dough.

The best thing though is that we can make three dessert with the same ingredients at the same time without much hassle given that we size up the ingredients.

Monkey bread will require some sort of baking mold like a bundt cake or Kugelhopf mold to achieve the well-known circular shape. At need, it can be made in any other shape but the size of balls needs to be adjusted accordingly.

Too small size balls could stick together so tight that it makes almost impossible to pull them apart after baking so take that into account while filling the baking forms.

This particular recipe will steer away from processed sugar and uses natural ingredients like honey or agave syrup to provide a delicious but healthy as possible treat for the craving ones.

Ingredients

Dough

• 1 cup / 250ml Milk
• ⅓ oz / 10g Fresh yeast
• 5 cup / 600g Flour
• 7 tablespoon / 100g Butter (room temperature)
• 3 Eggs
• 1 tablespoon Honey or sweetener of choice

Covering

• 7 tablespoon / 100g Butter
• 1 tablespoon Honey or sweetener of choice
• 2 tablespoon Cinnamon (ground)

How to make Cinnamon monkey bread

Dough

1. Put yeast into lukewarm milk to dissolve.
2. Measure flour, butter and put them in a mixing bowl together with eggs, honey, the yeasty milk.
3. Dough it together until getting and even dough.
4. Cover the bowl and leave it in a warm place for an hour to raise. Meanwhile make the cinnamon covering.

Covering

1. Put melted butter, ground cinnamon and honey in a small bowl to mix them together.

Assembly

1. Preheat oven to 350°F / 180°C.
2. When the dough doubles in about an hour, take it out of the bowl to put it on a well floured surface.
3. Roll it out to about ⅞” / 2cm height.
4. Cut little balls with a 1½” / 4cm cookie cutter.
5. Roll the first layer of balls onto the cinnamon-butter cover.
6. Place them into the baking form.
7. Place the next layer of balls on top without dipping them and now brush them with the same cinnamon covering. The reason we don’t dip the higher layers into the cinnamon cover is that doing so picks up too much of the butter cover that slowly drips down into the bottom of the baking form creating a buttery pool without much use. 
8. Put it into the preheated oven for about 30 to 40 minutes to bake.
9. Let it cool a couple of minutes then take it out to a cooling rack for a bit more.
10. For fancy serving place some balls onto a plate and pour vanilla custard over it.

 

Enjoy!

When the Cinnamon monkey bread is done and the all the plates are washed up let’s get started with the next batch:

 

• Chocolate Pull Apart Bread Recipe
• Gugelhupf Recipe
• Sugar Free Cinnamon Pull-Apart Bread Recipe

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