Friday, June 29, 2012

Where There's Smoke, There's...Monkey Bread

Several years ago, a girl I knew told me about monkey bread, several times.  She said it was really good and her sister made it a lot.  She couldn't tell me much more than that so I finally asked her mother what monkey bread was.  Was it shaped like a monkey?  Was it something monkeys liked?  Her mother wasn't entirely sure how you made it, but said her oldest daughter made it sometimes (and by the way it does not look like a monkey and as far as I know monkeys don't eat it, so I'm still not entirely sure where the name comes from, but I've heard it's because you pick at it).  Anyway, I didn't give monkey bread a lot more thought after that until someone brought it into work one day and it was GOOD.  I looked up the recipe, but it said you needed a Bundt pan or a springform pan to make it.  I had neither so I didn't make it.  Fast forward to a few months ago and I was at one of those Pampered Chef parties and felt guilted into buying something so I decided to purchase a springform pan and then I could make monkey bread (and other things).  The springform pan came in and proceeded to sit in a cabinet for quite some time.  The one day around Easter time while at the grocery store, I saw some of those Pilsbury biscuit mix things (when looking for something else) that had a recipe for monkey bread on it and decided I'm going to buy this and try to make monkey bread. If it came out good, I could make it for Easter. So that Saturday, I made the monkey bread, put it in the springform pan, and put it in the oven, then went about my weekly house-cleaning.  The house smelled great, and then it didn't.  It smelled like something was burning.  The bread had been in there for fewer than 20 minutes so there was no way it could be burning as it was supposed to cook for at least 40 min.  I checked the oven and the springform pan was leaking!  I tried to put a pan underneath to catch the drips, but I was too late.  A few minutes later the smoke detector went off and my kitchen was a smoking mess.  Thankfully, it was nice out as I opened windows, put on fans, etc. and was quite depressed about my monkey bread.  I saved what I could and finished cooking some of it in the toaster oven.  Some of it turned out okay, but much of it ended up in the trash.  :-(  I don't know if it was me or the pan.  But hey who doesn't want to spend a Saturday cleaning an oven or airing out a house?  :-p  I tried reassembling the pan later in case I'd made a mistake (though really it was two steps, not that hard to "assemble" even for me), tried filling it with water to test for leaks and it leaked through so either I'm a moron re: springform pan assembly, which is quite possible or I got a bad pan, which is also possible I suppose.  Needless to say we did NOT have monkey bread on Easter (but we did have too much other food, surprised?  I didn't think so, especially if you read my previos blog).  Well, fast forward again and one day at Target while looking for something else I saw a Bundt pan on sale and bought it and long story short, it too sat in my cabinet for WEEKS, but I finally made monkey bread in the Bundt pan on Sunday morning and guess what?  No smoke, no smoke detectors, no need to clean the oven, just delicious monkey bread.  In fact, it was so good, there was only a little leftover.  We picked at it all morning.  So here's to the Bundt pan!  And if you've never made monkey bread, you should, it's really good, just don't use a bad springform pan.   

2 comments:

Megan said...

I can't believe you didn't own a bundt pan! Wtf? FYI, I always get my baking pans at the Christmas Tree Shop. They are super cheap and usually work perfectly fine & they last.

Natalie said...

If your springform pan is leaking you can wrap it in foil before you use it.

So now you have a springform pan and a bundt pan, but do you have an angel food cake pan?