This Homemade Monkey Bread Is Fluffy, Gooey, and Wonderfully Sweet

There’s no such thing as too much cinnamon sugar: I’d happily eat all the cinnamon buns, cinnamon-sugar soft pretzels, and Moravian sugar cake I can get my hands on. Given my love for all things cinnamon, it’s no surprise that I also love monkey bread, a syrupy pull-apart pastry with plenty of cinnamon. The bread typically consists of dough that is rolled into balls, dipped in melted butter and cinnamon-sugar, then nestled in a Bundt pan and drenched in brown sugar syrup. As the loaf bakes, the syrup caramelizes and coats each roll. The pieces of dough cling together, creating a tear-and-share style loaf that is pillowy-soft, satisfyingly sticky, and downright delicious. 

The loaf has a variety of names, including pinch me cake, bubble loaf, sticky bread, pull-apart cake, plucking cake, and monkey brains. But no matter what you call it, this cinnamon-y sweet treat is easy to make, fun to eat, and the ultimate dessert for sharing. No knives or utensils required, but you might want to keep the wet wipes handy.

A Brief History of Monkey Bread

Monkey bread likely evolved from aranygaluska, a round pull-apart cake that Hungarian immigrants brought with them to America during the 19th century. Consisting of dough balls rolled in walnuts and sugar, the cake is not unlike monkey bread today. In 1950, Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook included a recipe inspired by the Eastern European baked good. Called a “Hungarian Coffee Cake,” the book’s version is made with yeast-raised dough that’s coated with melted butter, pecans, and cinnamon sugar. This pull-apart style of pastry soon earned the name “monkey bread,” possibly because its appearance resembled the South American monkey puzzle tree, or because it’s consumed by pulling the pieces apart by hand—the way monkeys eat.

Monkey bread recipes began appearing in American women’s magazines from the 1950s onward. The first lady Nancy Reagan further popularized the pastry by serving it at White House Christmas parties in the 1980s, and shared her recipe in both the 1987 White House Family Cookbook and the 1992 USO Celebrity Cookbook. ZaSu Pitts, a 1930s silent film star whose own recipe appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press in 1945, is often credited with introducing monkey bread to Reagan, who—like her husband—was an actor before her time in the White House. 

Today, the pastry is sold in coffee shops and bakeries, and many home cooks create their own versions—often with canned or frozen buttermilk biscuits—at home. While there’s nothing wrong with reaching for ready-made dough when you’re in a pinch, taking the time to make monkey bread from scratch can result in an even more delicious and rewarding bake.

How to Make the Ultimate Monkey Bread

Make an enriched dough from scratch. Ready-made biscuit dough is, well, rather biscuit-like, not the soft, pillowy dough that’s ideal for something like monkey bread. Here, I create a yeasted dough enriched with eggs and butter, resulting in a moist, fluffy texture similar to that of milk bread or brioche. The fat from the eggs and butter coats the gluten proteins glutenin and gliadin, limiting the amount of gluten that can form. While gluten is essential for the structural integrity of the loaf, too much gluten can result in tough, chewy monkey bread. By incorporating plenty of dairy, we make it harder for the proteins to bond, while also giving the monkey bread its buttery flavor.

Portion your dough. I recommend rolling the dough into a rectangle, then slicing it into six rows of eight for 48 portions of dough. The portions don’t need to be perfectly precise, though, and you can eyeball it if you don’t feel like cutting the rectangle into squares. Portioning the dough gives the monkey bread its signature look and makes it easy to tear and share. 

Coat the dough in butter and cinnamon sugar. To coat the dough, I dip each ball into melted butter, then drop it into a bowl of cinnamon sugar. The fat and moisture from the butter, however, can cause the cinnamon sugar to clump up. Rather than rolling the balls in the main bowl, I separate some of the coating into a smaller dish and use it for dipping, then top it off as needed, which prevents the cinnamon sugar from clumping. Don’t be stingy with the butter and sugar—try to use all or most of both. The sugar is important because it helps glue the dough into its pretty loaf shape, while the oil in the butter lubricates the dough so it doesn’t adhere too firmly—you want the pieces to pull apart with relative ease. There’s no need to create a specific pattern as you arrange the balls in the pan, since the freeform appearance is part of the charm.

Drizzle the monkey bread with a brown sugar syrup. The drizzle should look thick and syrupy, but don’t worry if the butter separates slightly or if the mixture doesn’t look totally smooth. (Do not boil or cook the syrup for an extended period, as this can cause the sugar to crystallize and result in a grainy syrup that’s difficult to pour.) To give the syrup its deep butterscotch flavor, I use brown sugar, which has deep molasses notes. I like to use light brown sugar, since that’s what I typically have in my pantry, but dark brown sugar is delicious too. After you drizzle the syrup all over the loaf, gently tilt the pan or tap it lightly on the countertop so the syrup can sink into the nooks and crannies between each ball and down the sides of the pan, thoroughly coating the entire loaf.

Let it cool. Though it’s tempting to invert the bread immediately after baking, it’s crucial to wait five minutes before flipping it out onto a rimmed serving plate. If you release it immediately, the syrup will create a sticky mess, and if you wait too long, the brown sugar will stick to the pan, making it difficult to remove and ruining the pretty topping. After inverting, allow the bread to cool for another 20 to 30 minutes, until it’s just warm but no longer piping hot. You’ll likely want to dive in straight away, but be patient, or you’ll burn your hands and tongue, which will make for a deeply unsatisfying monkey bread experience.

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