Easy enough for kids to make, this cinnamon-sugar treat is just as appropriate for breakfast as it is for dessert. The traditional monkey bread is made my quartering refrigerated biscuits, rolling them in cinnamon-sugar, and popping them into a bundt cake pan (at least, that’s how it was made at grandma’s house).
This is a slightly modified version of that recipe, and while you can’t pick off bite-size gems of caramelized sugar goodness, it’s just as delicious (if not moreso) as the original. This recipe adds cream cheese to the mixture, giving it a sweet and tangy cinnamon swirl filling.
Most of the cream cheese is absorbed somehow into the dough leaving a tunnel of sweet, creamy cinnamon bliss running through the middle of your monkey bread. Meanwhile, the cinnamon sugar and melted butter all drip to the bottom of the pan (which is now the top of your bundt cake) to make a crunchy, caramelized, cinnamon-sugar glaze topping.
Since the pieces are a bit too big to be “bite size”, I served this in slices, but you could rip off pieces just as well. Make sure you invert your cake pan while it’s still warm so that you don’t lose the top half of your cake when the sugar cools and hardens.
Cream Cheese Monkey Bread
[ Printable Recipe ]
- 2/3 cup dark brown sugar
- 2/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon cinnamon
- Two 12-ounce tubes refrigerated buttermilk biscuits
- One 8-ounce package cream cheese, cut into 20 cubes
- ¾ cup butter, melted
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 12-cup bundt pan with cooking spray; set aside. In a medium bowl, combine the sugars and cinnamon; set aside.
2. Slice 10 discs of dough from each tube of biscuits. Set discs on a flat surface and set one cube of cream cheese in the center of each piece of dough. Wrap edges of dough up and around the cheese so all that is visible is the top side of cream cheese cube.
3. Place 10 dough-wrapped cheese cubes, cheese-side-up, in bottom of prepared pan. Top with half of the sugar mixture and half of the butter. Top with the remaining dough-wrapped cheese cubes, cheese-side-down, the remaining sugar and remaining butter.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 minutes. Invert onto a serving platter and serve.
[ Another winner from Pinterest ]
Natalie. i can’t even look at this picture without drooling all over my laptop. and then i re-read the title: cream cheese monkey bread.
as if monkey bread isn’t dangerous enough for me. this is going on the “to make” list, but only when there’s enough company around to safely keep myself from just tearing off chunks of this and “accidentally” eating the entire thing.
Cream cheese, too? Yum! Monkey bread on steroids. This is gonna have to be breakfast for me sometime soon. 🙂 Thanks for sharing!