On Saturday morning, I got up, looked out the window at the miserable rainy weather, and decided that some yeasty, sugary monkey bread was in order for breakfast. For some reason, I never consider this sort of thing far enough in advance to make the dough and retard it overnight. So when I say I made it for breakfast, what I really mean was that I started working on it around 8:00am, and proudly produced a finished product around about lunchtime. Jeremy was able both to take Freyja on her morning walk and make a Costco run for me before the dough had even risen enough for shaping.

I used a chocolate pecan monkey bread recipe from The Essence of Chocolate that Danielle of Habeas Brulee was kind enough to post, and I made minimal adjustments to it. I did use some white whole wheat flour in the dough, and a combination of some milk chocolate chips and part of a bar of Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate. The dough was a lovely one, very smooth and malleable (and not at all sticky like a certain potato bread dough). As suggested, I used the paddle on my stand mixer to knead it, but I’ll stick with the hook next time because my dough crept straight up to the top of the paddle and made a bit of a mess.

Lacking a bundt pan, I used the mock bundt insert in my 9″ springform pan instead. It doesn’t hold as much as a real bundt, so I had a small amount of unused dough leftover, as well as some remaining butter and filling. There was more than enough bread for the two of us, however; never fear! The resulting monkey bread (or bubble bread, if you prefer) pulled apart easily and wasn’t as sweet as I expected based on the ingredients. If I make it again, I might use just half the dough for breakfast and reserve the rest for a garlicky version to go with dinner.

Even though it was virtually lunchtime yesterday when the monkey bread finally emerged from the oven, we were only able to eat about half of it between the two of us. This morning, I used the leftovers to make an improvised monkey pain perdu. Although I didn’t use a recipe for it, I whisked up a custard of eggs, cream and some runny vanilla yogurt, honey and vanilla in my square pan, and left the remaining bread in it to soak for 20 minutes or so. Then I sprinkled everything with sugar, and baked the pan in a 400-degree oven for about 25 minutes, until the custard was set. Topped with a sprinkle of powdered sugar, it was a perfect way to breathe some life back into the staled bread.