Ever made monkey bread? It's delicious! This fun recipe is something the kids will enjoy making alongside you, and you can add an extra couple steps to turn it into a "King Cake" for Mardi Gras or any other time of year. We adapted this recipe from the Abu's Monkey Bread recipe in the Disney Princess Cookbook [ad]. (All the recipes in the book are really delicious and easy to pull off.)
Try your hand at this Monkey Bread, and step it up to a King Cake if you'd like:
- Mix 3 cups of flour, 4 tsp of baking powder, and 1 tsp of salt in a large bowl. With a table knife, cut 1/3 cup of cold butter into small pieces. Use your fingertips to pinch the butter into the flour mixture until the lumps of butter are about the size of peas. Then stir in 1 ¼ cups milk.
- Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead for about a minute. Pull off pieces of the dough and shape them into 2 ½ to 3 dozen golf ball-size pieces. (At this point in the recipe, I felt like my dough was a bit too sticky, so I added another tablespoon of flour, and that did the trick.)
- Mix ½ cup brown sugar, ½ cup white sugar, and 1 tsp cinnamon together in a small bowl.
- Melt 6 tbps butter in small bowl.
- One at a time, dip the dough balls into the melted butter, roll them in the sugar mixture, and place them in a prepared pan (fluted tube pan – I used a bundt cake pan). Stack the balls on top of one another until the pan is full.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes on 375 degrees F. (Use a toothpick to check for doneness.)
- Pull out of oven. Let sit for 10 minutes, then loosen the bread from the sides of the pan before flipping the monkey bread out of the pan and onto a plate.
- This is the full recipe for monkey bread, from the Disney Princess cookbook. But for a king cake, I used a simple recipe online for icing (3 cups powdered sugar, 1 tsp fresh orange juice, 1 tbsp milk, and a splash of vanilla.
- Ice cake and sprinkle with sanding sugar (green, gold, purple – purchased from Walmart cake aisle).
My entire family - including my husband who is a New Oreans native, gives this recipe two big thumbs up! I hope you enjoy it!
