This recipe just gives you a basic enriched vegan dough and you can add so many different types of ingredients to make the actual monkey bread, like chocolate, fresh, dried or frozen fruits, chocolate, nuts and seeds, chocolate, and chocolate! If you couldn't tell, I strongly recommend using chocolate, but if thats not your thing maybe just go the traditional way and coat the dough balls in some butter or margarine and then roll them in cinnamon sugar.
I used a mini bundt pan because I wanted as much crispiness as possible, however if you are looking for more of a gooey monkey bread use a normal sized bundt pan, if you want a smaller portioned monkey bread and don't have mini bundt pans, a regular cupcake pan will work just fine.
The favorite flavor for my family was the cherry, pecan and chocolate. To do this, just slice up some frozen or fresh cherries and coat them in a little bit of flour (about 1 Tbs) then layer cherries, chocolate and chopped toasted pecans with the dough balls into the mold and bake!
Just a tip, we've found that if you decide to use dried fruit and don't put anything else in with moisture, the monkey bread will be quite dry.
Ingredients (make about 18 mini bundt)
1/4 cup milk of choice (I used almond)
1/2 cup aquafaba
1 tsp yeast
3 Tbs brown sugar
1 Tbs olive oil
2 1/2 cups flour (here I used half whole wheat and half AP)*
1 tsp salt
*note that when you use whole wheat flour it will absorb more moisture than AP
Instructions
1. Heat up the milk and aquafaba until it is lukewarm (the same temperature as your finger). Add the yeast and brown sugar, stir it around and let the yeast bloom for 5 minutes. Add in the oil and stir, then add the flour and salt. Stir until it becomes a shaggy dough and then dump it out onto a clean surface to knead. To develop the gluten knead until you can take off a piece of dough and stretch it out enough to see the light through the dough with out it ripping(this is called the windowpane test). The kneading could take anywhere from 7-20 minutes.
2. Once the dough has been kneaded, form it into a ball and put it into a greased and covered bowl to sit in the fridge overnight.
3. The next morning the dough should have doubled in size and be nice and fluffy. Preheat the oven to 350F and grease whatever tin you are using.
4. Divide the dough into 18 even-ish portions and then divide those portions into 7 or 8 little balls. Prep all of your add ins. Now for the fun part, assembly!
5. If you are doing a traditional monkey bread, coat all of the dough balls in butter and then sugar, and then just pop them into the tins. If you want to do a less sweet monkey bread, layer the dough balls in the pan with some chocolate chips, fruit, seeds or nuts. Bake in the oven for 40-50 minutes or until a thermometer stuck into the middle of one of the breads reads somewhere over 210F. If they are browning too much just cover them with tin foil.
6. Take them out of the molds and cool on a rack. Best enjoyed still a bit warm from the oven.
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