I love making bread from scratch but it takes a lot of time and I hadn't done it in a while. For a couple years (yes, years) I've had it in my mind that I wanted to come up with a recipe for monkey bread -- you know, the cinnamon bread that you usually make by cutting up refridgerated biscuit dough and rolling it in cinnamon sugar and throwing it in a pan to bake as a loaf. Well, I wanted *real* bread -- not some nasty refridgerated biscuits. So Maddie and I pulled out 5 or 6 of my baking cookbooks and scoured them for suitable recipes.
I finally settled on using the basic dinner roll dough from Essentials of Baking. This is a Williams-Sonoma cookbook and I've had great luck in the past with the recipes I've made from many of their cookbooks, so I was hopeful.
Maddie read the instructions and I mixed things up. We left the dough to rise and Maddie checked on it after about 1 1/2 hours -- she was amazed! I think she is at a good age for an introduction to the magic of yeast!
Then came the improvisation. I cut up the dough into about 30ish chunks and I dipped them in melted butter. Then Maddie rolled them in cinnamon sugar -- maybe 1 tsp cinnamon to 2-3 Tbsp of sugar? We had to refill the cinnamon sugar bowl a couple times during the process and thing got a little unscientific. The whole loaf took 1/4 cup of melted butter though -- we didn't run out of that.
As Maddie coated them, she threw them into a bundt pan -- gotta love the classic bundt pan! And then we left it to rise while the oven pre-heated (about 20 minutes). Bake at 375 for about 35 minutes and once cool, turn out onto a pretty plate!
It is quite yummy and would actually be suitable as a coffee cake. (I'm eating some as I drink my coffee right now!) It's sweet and buttery and I'll definitely make it again.