You’ll go ape wild for this boozy twist on a traditional monkey bread recipe, with bite sized bobbles of homemade brioche dipped in cinnamon sugar and smothered in bourbon banana caramel, then baked until bubbling and crispy around the edges.
Sticky sweet and drunk with flavor, this boozy monkey bread features a banana caramel sauce spiked with a generous dose of bourbon (hence the name) and a scratch-made brioche that’s pillowy soft and oh-so-good. Make the dough the night before and assemble it in the morning of for a perfect brunch for a bunch (one pan easily serves 10 to 12).
Monkey bread gets its name by the method in which it is eaten: picking off chunks of buttery, gooey dough with your fingers not unlike a monkey grooming his buddy (which is actually a weird thing to name a food after, if you really think about it.)
I figured, it’s called monkey bread, it should have some banana in it. And if monkey bread is good, drunken monkey bread would be even better, so let’s add some bourbon to the mix too (the alcohol pretty much all bakes out in the oven, however it can be replaced by a smaller amount of vanilla if you need something family friendly).
The pièce de résistance is the caramel sauce: sweet and sticky and boozy, like bananas foster in sauce form (and in fact, if drunken monkey bread wasn’t such a fabulous name, I would’ve called it Bananas Foster Monkey Bread).
This caramel sauce is what brings the whole thing together. It’s poured over the raw balls of brioche so they bake up extra sticky and gooey, and also lusciously drizzled on top of the whole thing; there’s even enough leftover for dipping and dunking.
Really, you can’t have too much of this caramel.
For most people, monkey bread is made with refrigerated biscuit or bread dough. Which is fine and easy (and you could certainly use that here too), but can I just say that nothing quite compares to buttery homemade brioche?
It took me a few tries to get the brioche just right, fluffy and puffy and buttery, but still with enough structure that you can pull off pieces without it falling apart (my first attempt, despite being divinely fluffy, wasn’t so sturdy).
It’s technically a cheater brioche with melted butter, but in the end that’s what resulted in the best texture and consistency. Traditional brioche is made by slowly incorporating solid butter into the bread dough, a somewhat tedious process that results in a beautifully rich dough. But in this case, it was just too soft (if there is such a thing).
Using half all-purpose and half bread flour adds to the structure of the brioche as well; the higher protein content of the bread flour allows the brioche to absorb more liquid, resulting in a softer overall dough.
I recommend making the brioche dough the day before. It only takes about 30 minutes to mix up, then cover and pop it in the refrigerator overnight.
The next morning, get the dough out of the fridge right when you wake up, as it’s best if it comes to room temperature before working with it.
Press the dough out into an even rectangle, then use a pizza cutter to cut the dough into about 40-50 similarly sized pieces (I found this to be quicker than pulling off individual pieces of dough). Shape each piece into a ball, then dip in melted butter and roll in cinnamon sugar before arranging in your (well greased!) baking pan.
Fill the pan with about half of the dough balls, then drizzle with 1/3 cup of caramel. Top with the remaining dough and another 1/3 cup of caramel. Save the rest of the caramel to drizzle on top of the baked bread as well as serve on the side for dipping.
I baked this in a deep 12-cup bundt pan. Whatever pan you use, just know the dough will rise quite a bit, so don’t fill it more than 2/3 of the way full.
Also: I highly recommend (no, implore) you set the bundt pan on top of a cookie sheet as it bakes. In case the caramel decides to bubble over, you’ll save yourself one heck of a mess. Trust me on this one.
Buttery, fluffy homemade brioche smothered with a boozy bourbon banana caramel sauce and baked until bubbly and crispy around the edges. It’s a boozy twist on a traditional monkey bread!
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