Nutty Monkey Bread

Good advice is easy to find but hard to follow. Take for example " Never serve people something you make the first time." I find this to be very smart, but it's not always realistic especially with a food blog. The food you see often gets made several times to get it just right. I thought of that phrase as I stared at a puddle of scalding cinnamon sugar oozing everywhere in my oven. "This was a bad idea." I thought. While there was a huge mess to clean up after I made this, my guests and I would agree it was well worth it. 

Some great buddies of mine were having a brunch get together and they needed a sweet treat. This was the first thing that came to mind. I had never made it before but it seemed simple enough so I bought all the ingredients and started making this far too late in the evening.

Ingredients 

24 thawed Rhodes Rolls

1 1/2 cup of Cinnamon Sugar ( 1 1/2 cup sugar + 2 teaspoons cinnamon)

1/2 cup melted butter

1 cup chopped pecans

I made an assembly line to start off the process. Cut each roll into four pieces and then roll it in the butter. Make sure your butter is melted but not too hot.

Then toss the dough pieces into the cinnamon sugar mixture. I like to press the dough into the sugar to really get it to stick. 

 I then ploped each of the dough pieces into a greased spring form pan. Big mistake! Use just a tall cake pan or a casserole dish and grease it really well. I do a full layer of the rolls and then sprinkle over half of the nuts. Then repeat so each bite has a bit of crunch.

If you have any leftover sugar or butter, just evenly put it over the dough. 

Let the dough rise until doubled in size. This should take about an hour. 

They're just so happy and poofy lookin'! When they poof up like this, then bake the dough at 350 for about 45 minutes to an hour. 

It wasn't too long after the bread was baking that I started hearing a weird noise. Drip...sizzle. Drip....sizzle. I looked into the oven and it looked like a volcano of syrup had erupted. The butter and sugar had leaked through the bottom of the pan! Quickly I went to work and put on my pretty pink rubber gloves (naturally) and started a painful transfer of the molten lava like dough into another pan. You can easily avoid this by using a casserole dish. 

Despite the troubles this was a crazy tasty brunch addition!