Monkey Breading Around

I woke up at 5:30 AM yesterday morning for some ungodly reason. As I lay in bed pondering what to do about this, I thought, bakers get up before this hour every day – so why not bake? My younger stepsisters were heading to camp around noon, so I made a Monkey Bubble Bread from my non-vintage Achilles heel cookbook – Baked Explorations.


The recipe for this fabulous breakfast treat (which is kind of like a mass of packed-together, inside-out cinnamon rolls) is already online elsewhere, so I’m not going to reproduce it here. Instead, I’ve got a kind of step-by-step photo journal. I kind of love how the light gets better and better as you scroll down…

Sunrise

 

5:30. Start time

 

Dissolving yeast in milk

 

Mixing dry ingredients

 

The recipe takes one egg...

 

...lightly beaten

 

Adding milk and yeast to flour and sugar

 

Melting butter...

 

...and pouring it in

 

Dough hooks make life easy

 

Before the first rise

 

And after

 

And then after punching down

 

Dough cut into bubble-size pieces

 

Bubbles wrapped against drying

 

First bubble layer

 

Bubbles are dipped in butter...

 

...then rolled in cinnamon and brown sugar...

 

...then pressed into the pan...

 

...until they're all smushed in

 

This oven makes my life easy

 

7:20. Start proofing

 

Old school. Damp towels only.

 

8:00. End of proof

 

Bubbles are puffy

 

And now they're baked

 

And delicious

 

And being eaten

 

And...gone

 

The End