Is it Monkey Bread? or Cinnamon Pull-Aparts as my cookbook describes it? Or is it ooey-gooey sweet bread waiting to be devoured, like it looks on my counter? Does it matter what we call it? What’s in a name anyway?
Before I tackle that question with an illustration from the Nordic Ware company- here is the recipe I follow, without theoptional nuts. [Nuts are never an option at our house. It’s okay, really. We manage to get enough protein and for some of us, we don’t even know what we are missing. For those of us who do know what we are missing – we eat peanuts on the sly when we are far, far away and will not be within hugging distance of our class-six-peanut-allergy-cuties.]
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Now, here is the recipe:
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)
2 to 3 (12 ounce) cans refrigerator biscuits, quartered
1/2 cup butter or margarine, melted
1 cup brown sugar
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Put cinnamon, sugar, and nuts, if desired, in a resealable plastic bag. Add quartered biscuits to bag and shake to coat biscuits. Place biscuits in a greased 10 inch bundt** pan.
Mix butter and brown sugar, stirring until sugar is dissolved. (Can also be put in a saucepan and heated together [I cook mine in the microwave.]) Pour sauce over top of biscuits, distributing evenly. Bake 30 to 40 minutes (Check at 30 minutes–3 cans of biscuits may take 40 minutes.) Turn pan upside down on serving plate to release the biscuit ring.
That little gem of a recipe is from Diane Wilson, out of the book “Remedies for the I Don’t Cook Syndrome,” compiled by Janet Peterson. Great book and great title, isn’t it?
I must be waiting for the “Remedies for the I Don’t Sew Syndrome,” or the “I Don’t Scrapbook Syndrome.”
Oh well. Until those hit the shelf, my family and I can enjoy some Monkey bread.
**By the way, according to my handy research over at Wikipedia (don’t judge)
“The people credited with popularizing the Bundt cake are American businessman brothers: H. David Dalquist and Mark S. Dalquist, who co-founded cookware company Nordic Ware. In the late 1940s,Rose Joshua and Fannie Schanfield, friends and members of the Minneapolis Jewish-American Hadassah Society approached Dalquist asking if he could produce a modern version of a traditional cast iron Gugelhupf dish. [I looked this up to, but I won’t go into it here, except to say it’s something like a fruit cake.] Dalquist and company engineer Don Nygren designed a cast aluminum version which Nordic Ware then made a small production run of in 1950. In order to successfully trademark the pans, a “t” was added to the word “Bund”. A number of the original Bundt pans now reside in the Smithsonian collection.”