The Overnight Prep For Effortless Monkey Bread In The Morning

The sweet, carb-a-licious weekend morning favorite that is known as monkey bread usually uses canned biscuit dough as the base. Don't worry, just like how coffee cake contains no coffee, monkey bread contains no primates. Of course, if you're making your own dough from scratch, you're a rock star. But I have generally avoided making monkey bread because, well, I don't love the taste of canned biscuits, and I really don't love getting up early to bake anything. So, when I found out that you can use frozen bread rolls and prepare monkey bread the night before you serve it, I thought that perhaps it was time to give the indulgent dish a shot.

When you use frozen bread rolls to make monkey bread, you don't even need to let the pre-formed balls thaw before you get to work. You'll prep your baking pan (usually a Bundt pan) with butter and flour or baking spray. If you're using nuts, scatter them in the bottom of the pan. Next, you simply drop the balls of frozen dough into the pan and pour a mixture of melted butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon over the dough. Cover the pan with plastic wrap and let it sit on the counter for a couple of hours, then transfer the pan to the fridge overnight, where the dough will fully thaw and rise. In the morning, remove the plastic wrap, bake the monkey bread, and invert it on a serving platter to serve. The rolls will have puffed up gorgeously and will taste like freshly baked bread soaked in buttery, cinnamon sugar goodness.

What makes using frozen bread rolls simple is that you don't need to cut them into smaller pieces before placing them in your pan. In fact, even though using canned biscuit dough doesn't require time in the fridge overnight, it still takes more prep work. Canned biscuit dough is pre-sliced into rounds, which are too big to drop into a pan for monkey bread. Typically, you'll need to take each slice and cut it into bite-sized pieces, which you then individually coat in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar before placing them into a pan and pouring over a butter-sugar mixture.

Monkey bread made with frozen bread rolls (or even leftover pizza dough) is excellent for customizing, much like the Hungarian dish called aranygaluska, or golden dumpling cake, which is believed to have inspired monkey bread. You can sprinkle extra nuts in between the layers of dough balls, combine cocoa powder into your melted butter-sugar mixture, or spoon jam throughout the bread before it's baked. Our favorite is the raspberry flavor from Bonne Maman, but you can use any jam you love. You can add additional spices to your cinnamon, like pumpkin pie spice or nutmeg, and you can drizzle the top of the finished bread with a simple cream cheese icing.