Best Monkey Bread

This sweet, sticky, gooey pull-apart bread, whimsically called "monkey bread," is a popular sharable treat for breakfasts, desserts, and snacks.

Tasting like pull-apart sticky buns, monkey bread is easy to make with everyday pantry ingredients, and can be customized with add-ins like dried fruits, nuts, and spices to suit your tastes. And with thousands of ratings and reviews, this is one of our best monkey bread recipes of all time.

What Is Monkey Bread?

Monkey bread is a pull-apart bread made with bite-size pieces of dough coated with sugar and spice and baked with a buttery brown sugar sauce in a tube or Bundt pan. To serve monkey bread, invert it onto a large plate and let everyone pull it apart into individual pieces with their fingers or forks.

Why Is It Called Monkey Bread?

That's a good question without a definitive answer. Some say it's called monkey bread because you pick the bread apart with your fingers as though you're eating like a monkey, and some say it's because the baked monkey bread resembles the zigzag pattern of a monkey puzzle tree (Chilean pine).

More: Our Best Monkey Bread Recipes of All Time

Monkey Bread Ingredients

These are the ingredients you'll need for this monkey bread recipe:

• Biscuit dough: This recipe uses cut-up pieces of canned biscuit dough as a convenient shortcut ingredient.
• Sugar and cinnamon: Used to coat biscuit dough pieces both for flavor and to make them easier to pull apart after baking. You can substitute other ground spices such as cardamom or a pumpkin spice blend.
• Walnuts (optional): You could substitute pecans or leave out the nuts altogether.
• Raisins (optional): You could substitute dried cranberries or other small bits of dried fruit.
• Margarine and brown sugar: Combined and briefly boiled to create the sweet caramel-like sauce that holds the monkey bread together. Many reviewers use butter instead of margarine. Be sure to pack down the brown sugar firmly into the measuring cup to get the correct amount. Some home cooks recommend adding about ¼ cup cream or milk to help keep the sauce soft even after it cools.

How to Make Monkey Bread

You'll find the full, step-by-step recipe below — but here's a brief overview of what you can expect when you make this top-rated monkey bread:

1. Cut the biscuits into quarters and coat in cinnamon-sugar.
2. Arrange the pieces in the pan. Add the raisins and nuts among the pieces if you're using them.
3. Boil the brown sugar and margarine, then pour over the biscuits.
   
4. Bake the monkey bread in the preheated oven.

Get more tips for How to Make Monkey Bread.

How to Serve Monkey Bread

Monkey bread is meant to be pulled apart and eaten with fingers or forks. There's no need to cut and slice. It's best when served warm and the sauce is still soft and sticky, but it's good eaten cold as well.

How to Store Monkey Bread

Monkey bread can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for three or four days. You can wrap and freeze baked monkey bread for up to three months. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator.

Allrecipes Community Tips and Praise

"Fun to make & delicious to eat! I cut the recipe into ⅓ and only used 1 can of biscuits in an 8" round cake pan. Cooked for about 20 minutes. My 2½-year-old enjoyed helping me roll the balls. Also, previous reviewer suggested using a pizza cutter to cut the biscuits —great shortcut," says Allrecipes home cook BBURG_HOKIES.

Reviewer Stephanie C offers this tip: "Scrumptious! I used frozen yeast roll dough to get a more homemade yeast bread flavor and the results were outstanding! You can make it the night before this way: Thaw 18 golf ball-size raw yeast rolls over about an hour. Once thawed, cut each in half. Follow the recipe for coating and layering. After pouring the brown sugar mixture over dough, place in cold oven overnight to rise. Follow baking instructions in the morning. Absolutely perfect! The entire extended family loved it!"

"The only tips I could offer would be to make sure you don't press down on the dough balls once you get them in the pan, or else the sauce won't make it all the way through the loaf and get it all gooey and delicious on the inside. Also, I'd make about 50 percent more sauce than the recipe calls for, because people seem to go for the parts that have the most sauce," says reviewer JenniJ3333.

Editorial contributions by Vanessa Greaves