monkey bread and dutch pancake

I'm a bit reluctant to share this picture, but it sums up last weekend so well that I feel I have no choice. Between Friday night and Monday morning I ate nothing but baked goods and cheese. OK, I also ate a couple of pieces of fruit, but I didn't even see a vegetable, let alone eat one. As you can see, by Sunday morning I had turned into the crazy carb lady. I'd like to blame my indulgence on the still non-functioning cooktop (thanks, Department of Buildings!), but only having an oven didn't mean I had to make monkey bread...and making monkey bread didn't mean I had to eat all of it myself.

Have you ever had monkey bread? I know it as the addictive, warm, butter-oozing first offering at the tearoom in Neiman Marcus in Houston, where it is served with strawberry butter and a tiny cup of consomme. Imagine brioche, but even more buttery and tender; imagine one of those foods with which it is pretty much impossible to be generous ("you insist I have the last piece? OKAYTHANKYOU!") It is just as much of a treat to go to lunch at Neiman's with my mother and sister now as it was when I was a little girl, and I find that the greedy consumption of monkey bread before constrasts nicely with the polite nibbling of chicken salad and sipping of tortilla soup after. You can see a totally seductive picture of monkey bread as I know it on the cover of the Neiman Marcus cookbook. Friday night a glass of pink wine inspired me to bake something happy, and I turned to the NM cookbook for the first time.

My monkey bread was not as sublime as the stuff in the store--it was a little tougher and, shockingly, could have used even more butter--but it was pretty good (not to mention heartbreakingly gorgeous, at least by my standards). Let's just say that I ate a lot of monkey bread this weekend--hot, cold, with jam, without...if I had had more restraint, I would have realized my dream of eating it with chocolate; maybe next time. I remembered that Heidi at 101 Cookbooks tried it once, too, and hers is covered with crunchy sugar; a fantastic idea. An internet search turns up some frightening concoctions of canned biscuits, margarine, and cinnamon. Friends: do not be fooled. This is not monkey bread.

In any event, I want to experiment before posting a recipe.

After eating monkey bread for breakfast and lunch on Saturday and bread and cheese for dinner, what was there to do but try the tempting Dutch pancake for Sunday breakfast? I followed the Food Section's recipe and was delighted. Not only was it delicious, it was also terribly exciting to put so little effort into something that puffed up with such topographical drama. This is my un-powdered, un-lemonspritzed pancake--and a document recording my reunion with my beloved cast iron skillet, sprung from storage at last so that I can feel like Ma Ingalls in the city once again.

Comments

[Jennifer]

I all my years I've never seen monkey bread made in muffin tins. What a great idea! Usually I make it in a bundt pan and we end up eating the whole thing. This is a much better way to portion the gooey goodness.

[Robin]

It was very easy in the muffin tins, and it still pulls apart into satisfying little chunks. But as I said, having it neatly portioned did not keep it from disappearing faster than it should have!

[Jennifer]

I'm am so relieved to read your post about Monkey bread. Two months ago, an 13 year old in my church (where I serve as an Episcopal priest) wanted to have a youth group gathering to bake--I was all over the idea. Cook with your kids--fabulous idea. He suggested monkey bread (which I had never heard of) and gave me the recipe he had gotten from his teacher in school where they had made it recently. I was appalled at the ingredient list but didn't want to squash his enthusiasm--so we baked it. I couldn't eat but a bite. The kids had fun but I kept telling them--this isn't really baking, you understand? So--I will bring them back and we'll do a real monkey bread recipe. It will be a great teaching moment--and a great relief to me!