Thursday, July 30, 2009

Monkey Bread made with Amish Bread

Amish Bread (this is a sweet bread)
  • 2 cups warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
  • 2/3 cup white sugar
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons active dry yeast
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 6 cups bread flour
Directions:
  1. In a large bowl, dissolve the sugar in warm water, and then stir in yeast. Allow to proof until yeast resembles a creamy foam.
  2. Mix salt and oil into the yeast. Mix in flour one cup at a time. Knead dough on a lightly floured surface until smooth. Place in a well oiled bowl, and turn dough to coat. Cover with a damp cloth. Allow to rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.
  3. Punch dough down. Knead for a few minutes, and divide in half. Shape into loaves, and place into two well oiled 9x5 inch loaf pans. Allow to rise for 30 minutes, or until dough has risen 1 inch above pans.
  4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 30 minutes.

Once you have the Amish bread made then you gather these things and do this:

Brown Sugar: 1/2cup will be needed
* 2 sticks of butter (1 cup)
* Bundt Cake Pan (feel free to use dorky shapes)
* Cinnamon: 2-3 teaspoons
* 3 cans of Buttermilk Biscuits (the non-flaky ones)
* Sugar!: 1 cup

Now before you do anything…go ahead and preheat that oven to 350 degrees You’ll need this in about 10 minutes.

Open up all three cans of biscuits and cut each biscuit into quarters. (Or in our case cut up your bread dough into small pieces.)
At this time you’ll want to combine the 1 cup of regular sugar with 2-3 teaspoons of cinnamon. I use 3 teaspoons of cinnamon and this gives it a fairly strong cinnamon flavor. If you’re not so hot on cinnamon, cut it back to 2 teaspoons. Dump these into a 1 gallon zip bag and shake to mix evenly. Drop all of the biscuit quarters into the cinnamon-sugar mix. Go ahead…all of them. Yes, they’re sticking together right now, but just trust me.
Once all the biscuit quarters are in the bag, seal it and give it a vigorous shake. This will get all those pieces unstuck from one another and nicely coated with the cinnamon-sugar. You might have some excess sugar left over and that’s okay.
Spread these nuggets out evenly in your bundt pan. I suppose you might want to grease this pan before doing this, but I’m pretty sure the gallon of butter we are about to add will keep it safe.
At this point, you’re going to want to melt those two sticks of butter together with 1/2cup of brown sugar. This can be light or dark brown sugar. Stir together over a medium-high heat until the two become one.
Once the brown sugar butter has become one color, you can pour it over the biscuits.
At first…it’s going to look like too much. It’s okay though.

Bake this @ 350 degrees for about 30-40 minutes until the crust is a deep brown on top.

If you have the willpower, allow this to cool for about 15-30 minutes before turning it over onto a plate. If it doesn’t slide right down onto the plate, give it a few love-taps until it plops. It’ll hold.


If you'd like a tutorial (probably because it just looks SOOOO yummy) click here.