Monkey Bread

 William has been here for the weekend and it has been a while since he has spent a weekend with us. 

He wanted to play his computer games all the time. I tried hard to discourage that one. 

Kay had a post about Too Good to Go, which is a cool idea to reduce food waste. It is an app that you can install. That got me all off on a google tangent for a while, but Kay's post, she mentioned monkey bread. 

I have not made monkey bread in years, but there is a simple recipe which uses buttermilk biscuits from the refrigerated section at Aldi's. I got an idea that it might be a thing which kept William occupied for a while. It's a very kid friendly recipe:

Two cans buttermilk biscuits

1/2 cup sugar

1 tablespoon cinnamon.

Dump this into a lidded plastic bowl. 

Open the biscuits and cut each biscuits into quarters. drop them, a few at a time, into the container of  cinnamon sugar. give them a good shaking to coat them and then drop them into a bundt pan that has been oiled. 

Once the dough is all coated and in the bundt pan, melt 3/4 cup of butter, add 1/2 cup of brown sugar. I also dumped in the rest of the cinnamon sugar. Blend it until smooth and then pour it over the biscuit pieces. 

Pop the pan into the oven and bake. They say 15 minutes, but we baked ours for 30. 

Take the bundt pan out, flip it. Break it apart, and dip the pieces in the ooey gooey-ness.

(Disclaimer: nothing gourmet about this, but my kids liked it quite a bit.)

This morning, William helped with some raking, at the rehab, and in our own back yard. When we came in, he began to pester for his computer time. 

"Nope," I said. "Get your shoes back on. We're going to the store. You're going to bake monkey bread." 

"Oh, boy," he said. 

Noting the lack of an exclamation mark, I said suspiciously, "Was that sarcasm? Because it kind of sounded like sarcasm."

(Don't judge me. Grandmas can get sarcastic too.)

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, no. There was NO sarcasm. I'm really excited. I can't wait." 

(I'm pretty sure he thought he was being funny.)

He got in the car and we went to the store, and we got the biscuits. I had everything else. I brought him home and brought the recipe up on my phone and washed dishes while he followed the recipe, grumbling "I don't really see where these are any different from cinnamon rolls. It's the exact same thing."

I said, "Well, if you want to make cinnamon rolls, we can do that!!!" in an excited voice, making sure that I was adding plenty of exclamation marks. 

At the thought of  a quick baking project turning into a bread baking afternoon, he just shushed and started cutting the biscuits into quarters. 

He followed the instructions well and within a half hour, he was popping the pan into the oven. 

He left the kitchen to play with his hoverball in the livingroom. 

(It was a $10 investment to stop the pestering. Don't judge me. Grandmas get fed up too.)

When the monkey bread was done, I pulled it out of the oven and flipped it on to a plate. After it cooled for a few minutes, I called him out. 

"You break a piece off and then you dip it in the ooey-gooey stuff and then you eat it."

He studied it suspiciously, but broke off a piece of it and sloodged it around in the ooey gooey. He popped it into his mouth. His expression changed. He broke off another piece and sloodged it around. In a bit more interested voice, he said, "Wow! This is pretty good!" 

I noticed that he was, once again, using exclamation marks.

"So...what you're saying is that from time to time, I do know what I'm talking about..."

"Sometimes," he agreed, with hardly any eye rolling at all. He broke off another piece of monkey bread.

In case you did not notice, in 3 months, William will be a teenager. No exclamation mark.