Weird Name, Fun Treat

I remember my mother making this when I was a child and then I forgot about it for about ten years until she made it again while I was visiting a few weeks ago.  I'm still working the bugs out of mine (and of course it's "never going to be as good as your mother's"), but if you're looking for an oddly addictive snack with absolutely no nutritional content whatsoever, boy do I have a recipe for you.

I'm not familiar with the actual origin of the name.  Despite the fact that I've encountered it nowhere except my mother's kitchen, I see that there are numerous recipes for it on the Web (some of which attempt to fathom a meaning along the lines of "monkeys would like to eat it" or "you eat it with your hands like monkeys"; I remain unconvinced, but then again I usually eat it with a fork).

That's right, four ingredients.  This is a really simple recipe, component-wise (labor-wise is another story).

If you like to decorate your food with baubles and trinkets, you can "dress it up" with various nuts, raisins, cherries or lite brite pegs, but I prefer mine unsullied.

I used to tease Haley that mom's monkey bread was good because she only used high-quality Sam's Club orangutan in it.  This is fallacious on two counts:

1) Despite the name, monkey bread is meat-free.

2) As Lane will point out with indignation, orangutans are not monkeys.

Okay, maybe it needs a little more input than that.  So carefully twist the can, just a little . . .

BOOM!

Seriously, this stuff has a really satisfying popping sound to it.   (I tried to take a video of it, but I was somewhat short in the required number of manipulatory appendages.)

This is refrigerated biscuit dough.  I don't know what's in it.  I don't really want to know.  I'm sure it's not healthy.  If all you want is biscuits (*cough* because you're lazy *cough*), you just put these on a sheet and bake them.

I'm the freaky guy who makes whole wheat biscuits so these just don't cut it.

We need to cut the biscuits into thirds, roll each third into the rough approximation of a sphere and coat it liberally (or conservatively, as your politics dictate) in cinnamon and sugar.

This step takes awhile.  Unless you're my mom, who apparently has figured out how to "edit, copy, edit, paste" with foodstuffs.

You actually looked back at the picture for him, didn't you?

This is a good time to point out that refrigerated biscuit dough has a remarkably similar consistency to Play-Dough, which makes this recipe suitable for all sorts of holidays.

If Halloween is your thing, go with jack-o-lanterns.

If Valentine's Day is around the corner, nothing says "I Love You" like a snack food named after a tree-dwelling primate . . .

You'll have to look that recipe up somewhere else, though.  I'm pretty sure that requires more than four ingredients.

Two hours later I finished the first layer.

(Time is relative, you know.)

Add a second layer, but no more.  I will elaborate on this point in succinct prose shortly hereafter.

What's a recipe without butter and sugar?  (Have I chronicled a recipe yet that didn't require them?)

Step 4:  Here we're heating the butter and brown sugar to convert them into a semi-liquid form.

Step 6:  Place the pan in an oven preheated to 350 degrees and set the timer for 40 minutes.  I cover mine with foil because I don't like the crunchy ones that are exposed to direct heat (at my mom's house I take the ones from the middle; yes, mom, I'm picky).  Skip the foil if you like them crunchy.

Note that we set the timer for 40 minutes.  This is important, because if prepared according to my directions, in about 30 minutes, you reach Step 7 . . .

Well, the smoke alarm, anyway.  Not the proper way to time your baked goods.

Turns out that "two cans of biscuit dough" in my mom's e-mail is kind of precise.  Normal-sized cans, genius.  "Jumbo" cans cause problems.   Whoops.  Here we have the results when the expanding biscuit dough, far too large for its loaf pan, pushes about half of the molten sugar out and onto the rack below it (where it swiftly burns to a kind of blackish-red tar).

Although I was impressed with the pretty colors that were swirling just beneath the smoke in my oven.

And thus we remove the loaf, allow it to cool and serve (it's best warm, but it's "burn your tongue" warm coming out of the oven, so be careful).  Microwave later for a quick treat.