Pumpkin Monkey Bread
This pumpkin monkey bread is soft and fluffy topped with a gooey pumpkin butterscotch sauce.
Monkey Bread From Scratch
I love making a monkey bread because it’s so fun and rustic. If you’re not familiar, it’s made with little pieces of dough, rolled in cinnamon-sugar and butter, and stacked in a bundt pan. After rising, you pour over a butterscotch sauce and then bake. The sauce becomes the glaze for the baked dough. I’ve put pumpkin puree in both the dough and sauce and the flavor comes through beautifully. This is the same dough that I use in my pumpkin cinnamon rolls.
Instead of dipping each ball individually, I coat my dough very rustically, by shaking the dough balls in a container with cinnamon-sugar, and then later on, the butter. This can kind of squish them into interesting shapes, but it makes the job a lot easier!
This is a yeasted dough
Some monkey bread recipes use biscuit dough or store-bought dough, but I love yeasted dough from scratch. It makes it extra fluffy and soft and gives me the option to add in pumpkin puree too.
You can make this recipe all in one day, or refrigerate the dough overnight for a slow rise. Then in the morning you can shape, rise again and bake. I flavor the dough with pumpkin pie spices though you can omit this if you just want the taste of the pumpkin and cinnamon coating to shine through. The butterscotch sauce has no spices added, the flavor in that comes from the brown sugar and pumpkin puree. It’s so good!
Overview of how to make it
- Make the pumpkin dough and let it rise
- Shape into 40 small balls, toss in cinnamon-sugar and butter
- Stack into a bundt pan and let it rise again
- Make the pumpkin butterscotch sauce.
- Pour this over the risen dough, and bake!
Some pictures of the process!
Inverting monkey bread
After baking, let the monkey bread cool for 5-10 minutes before inverting on a serving plate. Don’t let it get too cold or the butterscotch will harden and you won’t be able to get them out cleanly! When you’re ready to serve, you could cut this into slices, or (my fave way), rip of individual rustic pieces!
More pumpkin recipes
Pumpkin Monkey bread
Equipment
- 10-inch Bundt Pan
Ingredients
Dough
- 180 g whole milk lukewarm
- 2 teaspoons instant yeast or active dried yeast
- 50 g granulated sugar
- 500 g all-purpose flour plus more for dusting
- 170 g pumpkin puree
- 1 large egg
- 2 teaspoons pumpkin spice
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- 55 g butter softened to room temperature
Coating
- 200 g granulated sugar
- 1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon
- 45 g butter melted
Pumpkin Butterscotch Sauce
- 100 g soft brown sugar
- 115 g pumpkin puree
- 113 g butter
- 60 g heavy cream
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
Instructions
- In a small saucepan, warm the milk to around 95-104°F / 35-40°C and pour the warm milk into a bowl of a stand mixer. Sprinkle yeast and sugar over the milk. If using active dry yeast, let this sit for around 5-10 minutes until it becomes foamy; if using instant yeast, this step can be skipped.
- Add the flour, salt, pumpkin puree, spices, and egg to the yeast mixture. Fit the stand mixer with a dough hook attachment and mix to form a thick dough.
- Add in the softened butter. Keep mixing on medium speed for around 10-12 minutes until the soft dough is smooth and strong and it pulls away cleanly from the sides of the bowl. Alternatively, knead the dough by hand for 10-15 minutes. If you need a break, take it. The dough responds well to resting time.
- Once kneaded, form the dough into a smooth ball. Transfer the dough to a lightly greased bowl and cover.
- Let the dough rise in a warm place until doubled in size, around 1- 1 1/2 hours. The exact time the dough rises will depend on your room temperature. If making the dough ahead of time, it can be covered tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerated for up to 16 hours, which will rise more slowly.
- After rising, pull the dough from the bowl onto a lightly floured surface. Use a sharp knife or bench scraper to cut the dough into around 40 small pieces and roll each piece into a small ball.
Coating – Two options
- Option 1 – Melt some butter in a small bowl. In a separate small bowl, whisk together granulated sugar and cinnamon. Dip the balls in butter, then coat them in the cinnamon sugar mixture.
- Option 2 – Add all the small dough balls to a large container with a lid and shake over cinnamon sugar to stop them from sticking together. Shake the container to coat all the dough pieces in the cinnamon sugar mixture, then drizzle over the butter and shake again to coat.
- Grease a 10-inch bundt pan, and layer the coated little dough balls in the pan.
- Cover the bundt pan with a damp kitchen towel and let the dough rise again until about doubled in size.
- When the dough has almost finished rising, preheat the oven to 350°F/ 180°C.
- Melt brown sugar, butter, pumpkin puree, heavy cream, and salt in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil and cook for 2-3 minutes, whisking constantly.
- Take off the heat, then stir through salt and vanilla. Let it cool for a couple of minutes, then drizzle this carefully all over the dough. You might need need to give it time to seep through so it doesn’t overflow.
- Bake the monkey bread for 35-40 minutes until deeply browned on top. If the top is browning too fast, lay a piece of aluminum foil on it. Sometimes the butterscotch sauce can spill out so you can place a tray or a sheet of foil underneath to catch any spills.
- Once baked, let it cool for 5-10 minutes, then carefully invert it onto a serving plate.
Really happy to find a version of this recipe that incorporates so much pumpkin into more than one recipe component. Delicious and came together quite easily, only trouble I ran into was that the dough balls rose so much that they were overflowing from my pan, which was a nice problem to have because I usually have trouble getting dough to rise at all! Thank you for the tip about foil under the pan, it definitely saved me some cleanup! I imagine my pan must just be oddly shallow so I will take note for next time because I am sure I’ll make this again. Thank you!
So happy you loved it!!