19 Ooey, Gooey Recipes to Make You the Master of Monkey Breads (2024)

FAQs

What can I use if I don't have a bundt pan for monkey bread? ›

I bake mine in one of the best Bundt pans, but a tube pan works, too. You could even bake it in a muffin tin for individual monkey bread "muffins." Wouldn't that be cute?! Just be sure to adjust the baking time.

Monkey bread gets its name by the method in which it is eaten: picking off chunks of buttery, gooey dough with your fingers not unlike a monkey grooming his buddy (which is actually a weird thing to name a food after, if you really think about it.)

And yes, you can make Bundt cake recipes in regular cake pans, too! Knowing these baking pan conversions is super handy.

You can use two loaf pans, this should approximate the bundt pan. Another alternative is to use a deep circular cake pan with a ceramic ramekin in the center of it to create the hole. With either method you may need to adjust your cook time a bit depending on your results.

Dating back to the 1880s in Hungarian literature, Hungarian immigrants brought this dish with them when they immigrated to America and began introducing it into the country's food landscape when Hungarian and Hungarian Jewish bakeries began selling it in the mid-twentieth century.

Monkey Bread, aka Puzzle Bread, aka Hungarian Coffee Cake, may not have originated in the United States but in Hungary, where my paternal grandmother was born. And so, in my search for a dish that was previously unknown to me, I am somehow guided to an ancestral tradition. I think that grandmom would be pleased.

Bread Ingredients

Bananas: You will need 3 ripe bananas for the bread dough and 3 more bananas that will be diced and layered in between the balls of bread dough. Yeast: I used instant yeast in this recipe. It is also called quick rise or fast-rising yeast. Milk: I prefer whole milk in this recipe.

Bake the monkey bread for 40 to 45 minutes, or until the top of the loaf is golden brown. An instant read thermometer inserted into the center of the loaf should read between 190°F and 200°F. Serve and store. Serve immediately, or warmed.

Recipe Tip

To be entirely sure that the monkey bread is fully cooked and not doughy in the center, use a thermometer to verify that the middle has reached 190°F. If the top is browning too much and the center is still not at 190°F, lower the monkey bread in your oven and/or cover it with foil to prevent over-browning.

Can you reheat monkey bread? ›

Reheating leftover monkey bread in the oven will yield the best results. Place monkey bread on a baking sheet, cover with foil, and bake at 250 degrees F for 5-10 minutes.

There's no reason why you can't bake your bundt recipe in pans of a different size or shape. You can even use it for cupcakes. But most bundt recipes are fairly large, so if you divide it you will need to adjust the baking time. Just do a rough approximation and use a tester to tell when it's done.

The Bundt pan is necessary for certain types of light, delicate cakes or moist, heavy cakes that would otherwise just cave in the middle — it solves that problem by simply not having a center so the cake can cook evenly without collapsing.

A tube pan is a round pan with deep sides and a hollow center tube used for baking cake, especially angel food or sponge cake. A bundt pan is similarly constructed, but has fluted sides. Often, tube pans have detachable sides, which Bundt pans do not.