As I shared in this post, the first step toward living a simple life is not purging your closets or getting chickens or even starting a garden, but to start in the kitchen. Read the other posts in this series here.
My husband is a teacher and I worked in a school office for a couple of years, so even before kids we had a love of Snow Days off from school. (Except for the handful of times when we were ALREADY ON THE ROAD before the phone-chain call got to us. I’m so grateful for automated text messages now.)
One Snow Day when my oldest was about 2.5 years old, I decided to pop open a can of Pillsbury biscuits and make monkey bread for breakfast. You know the basic idea right? Little balls of dough rolled in cinnamon and sugar, placed in a pan, smothered in a sauce, baked, and picked apart with your fingers (like a monkey)?
It became a Snow Day tradition in our house. I made sure to keep a couple cans of biscuit dough in the fridge throughout the winter. We’ve never had a bundt pan (the traditional shape for monkey bread), but an 11×7 or 8×8 pan worked great (or a 9×13 if I wanted to double the recipe and take it for brunch elsewhere).
Over the years I learned sugar and dough alone were not the greatest for breakfast… so we began also having cheese and yogurt and fruit to round out our meal.
Lately I’ve been trying to eliminate more and more processed foods from our diet. While cans of biscuits sure are cheap and convenient, they do contain a lot of unnatural ingredients to help them last longer in the fridge.
I set out to find a recipe for monkey bread made entirely from scratch, but continued to run into one big roadblock: Almost all of the recipes I found required some rise time from the dough. If we found out at 6:30am that it was going to be a Snow Day, my kids would be up wanting to eat by 7:30-8:00. I wouldn’t have time for dough to rise for an hour, and I didn’t want to prep my dough the night before just in case we’d have a Snow Day the next day.
Finally I came across a recipe that sounded promising — just mix the dough, separate into balls, etc etc. On our next snow day I was excited to give it a try!
Unfortunately, the dough ended up very dry and crumbly and not very flavorful. 🙁
So I decided to try something I RARELY do with recipes for baked goods — I made some adjustments to it (I have no problem tweaking cooking/dinner recipes, but messing with anything that involves dough or batter and the oven terrifies me for some reason).
After a couple more mornings of experiments, I finally presented a pan of homemade monkey bread to my family and got a thumbs up from everyone.
This recipe takes 45-60 minutes start to finish, and even a little less if you have a kitchen helper.
Salted Caramel Monkey Bread
Ingredients
Biscuit dough
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 Tb white sugar
- 1 Tb cornstarch
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 6 Tb cold butter
- 1/2 cup whole milk
Biscuit coating
- 1/4 cup white sugar
- 1 Tb cinnamon
Caramel sauce
- 1/4 cup butter
- 2/3 cup brown sugar
- 2 tsp water
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/2 tsp salt
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F.
- Lightly butter the inside of an 11×7 or 8×8 pan.
- In a large bowl, mix together the dry dough ingredients: flour, 2 Tb white sugar, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt.
- Use a grater to shred the cold butter into the flour mixture. OR place some of the mixture and large chunks of butter into a food processor, chop the butter into very small pieces, and add back to the flour mixture.
- Add milk slowly while stirring, until the dough sticks together into a large ball. You might need a tablespoon more or less of milk, and it might be easiest to mix with your hands.
- Mix biscuit coating (1/4 cup white sugar and cinnamon) in a small bowl. Make 1/2- to 1-inch balls of dough (a cookie scoop is great for this), drop into coating. Shake/stir to cover dough balls.
- Place the balls in the buttered pan. Sprinkle any remaining coating mixture over top.
- In a small saucepan combine butter, brown sugar, and water. Bring to a boil for 2-3 minutes, until the sugar has dissolved.
- Remove from heat and add the vanilla and salt. Mix well.
- Pour sauce over dough.
- Bake 15-20 minutes, then let cool 5-10 minutes before eating.
Notes
I made this for a snow day afternoon snack and it was delicious! The biscuit dough is yummy- waay better than canned biscuits! I made this as written, but baked it in a bundt pan. It didn’t hold the bundt shape very well, I think because it’s sized for a smaller pan, so next time I’ll either double the recipe for not bother with the fancy pan. (Probably double the recipe… it’s really yummy lol). For the sauce, I just tossed everything in the pan before reading the directions that say to add the vanilla/salt after cooking, but it turned out just fine. I also put a full teaspoon of salt in because I like a salty salted caramel and it’s delicious. It came together really quickly even with “helpers”. When I was serving it, my 5 year old helper (who actually participated in the baking!) let out a huge sigh of relief and said “oh good, there’s no dead monkeys! See?! No monkey tails, so there’s no dead monkeys, we can eat it!” 🤣
Thanks so much for sharing your tips! I’m so glad there didn’t end up being any dead monkeys in yours! 🤣