Are you ready for the gooiest, loveliest, easiest recipe? Monkey Bread has been in and out of popularity for the last 80 years, but with ready-made pastry becoming a grocery store staple, it’s never been easier to make a batch and wow your family and friends.
Though many recipes call for homemade leftover dough, I use ready-made store-bought dough. I use pre-made croissant dough that comes in the tubes at the grocery store because I have two children and a passion for naps – and making croissant dough from scratch interferes with both just enough to shove me in the direction of the pre-made dough. And as I wrote in the Monkey Muffin post, The Pioneer Woman uses leftover dough. Pre-made is like leftover because it is sitting around ready to be used.
Other names for Monkey Bread can be bubble loaf, jumble bread, or pull-apart bread. It’s origins seem to trace to Boston’s Parker House Hotel and “Finger Rolls” from Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book by Mary Johnson Lincoln (page 70, Boston, 1884). I know this is cynical of me, but with most old cookbooks I always suspect the actual creator of the recipe was the author’s cook or maid.
Here’s how I made mine:
Croissant Dough Monkey Bread
- Butter, softened
- 2 packages of pre-made croissant dough (the roll-out kind), refrigerated
- Blend of half brown sugar, half white granulated sugar
- Ground cinnamon
- Non-stick bunt pan, 8-10″ across
- Vanilla essence/extract
- Condensed milk
1. I collected my ingredients on the counter. Then I created a blend of the two sugars and the ground cinnamon, which I kept in an air-tight container to make cinnamon toast, milk toast, or another batch next time. Preheat the oven to 375F or 190C so it’s hot and ready for the yumminess about to be baked up in it.
2. Put a little pat of butter and a sprinkling of sugar-cinnamon blend around all inside edges of the bunt pan.
3. Unroll the pre-made croissant dough out flat and onto that spread softened butter (like buttering toast) and sprinkle the sugar-cinnamon blend.
4. Then roll the buttered and sprinkled dough into mini croissants (like you are rolling a sleeping bag) and place them around the bottom of the bunt pan.
5. Once the bottom of the pan is filled one layer deep, top with a sprinkle sugar-cinnamon then add a couple drops of vanilla essence. Repeat this for two more layers.
6. Then into the oven it goes according to the instructions on the dough package plus 5 minutes. Then make sure it has puffed up and browned slightly. If it hasn’t, give it more time. If it has, then turn off oven and leave in there for a few minutes. Remove carefully and place a plate on top then invert the pan so the Monkey Bread falls onto the plate in one piece.
7. Final step is to drizzle with condensed milk. This is lovely when serving them as a dessert alongside a scoop of vanilla bean or cinnamon ice cream.
Yummy, right? If you want smaller servings, check out how I made Croissant Monkey Muffins. This is what they look like before I drizzled the condensed milk:
