Spice it Up: Cream Cheese and Chocolate Monkey Bread

I was scrolling through Facebook about two weeks ago and I came across a BuzzFeed video titled “Cream Cheese and Chocolate Monkey Bread.” Now, usually I wouldn’t sit through and watch an entire video because I don’t really have the patience for that, but because they combined two of my favorite things – cream cheese and chocolate- I just had to see exactly what they were making.

The monkey bread looked so good that I knew I just had to attempt to make it, I mean, it didn’t look very hard so there wasn’t any harm in me at least asking my parents to make it. I showed my mom the video and she went out that day to buy me the ingredients we needed.

Making it was honestly a lot harder than what the BuzzFeed video made it out to be. I didn’t use a bunt pan like they did and I paid for my mistake as I couldn’t get the middle to fully cook. My attempts to thoroughly cook the middle left me with a pretty crunchy outside.

I have a really bad habit of sampling everything as I cook. So by the time the monkey bread was done, I’d had my fair share of walnuts, chocolate, cream cheese and biscuit dough. This really curved my appetite for anything having to deal with the bread until the next morning.

When I tried the bread, I wasn’t really feeling the flavor at first. I thought it was too sweet and I didn’t really like the glaze that baked in to it. But, as I continued to eat it anyways, and I got to the insides that only had bread, cream cheese, chocolate and walnuts. I honestly really started to enjoy it. I’m probably the only person that doesn’t like the crust because I’m not a sugar person. Although my mom automatically loved it, I think next time I’d use a lot less glaze.

Now moving on to how to make the bread. All that’s needed is 16 biscuits, eight to 12 oz of cream cheese, chocolate morsels, one cup of brown sugar, one cup of granulated sugar, two teaspoons of cinnamon, one stick of butter and a gallon sized bag.

Take the 16 biscuits and let them thaw until they’re soft and dough-like. There’s also the option of using canned biscuits in which they’d already be soft. Split the biscuits in halves and knead them out into disks. Cut the eight oz cream cheese in to 32 pieces and place one of those pieces on each of the biscuit halves, then add a few chocolate chips with the cream cheese. Bring together the biscuits to form a ball around the cream cheese and chocolate.

Now, take the gallon sized bag and combine the one cup of sugar and the two teaspoons of cinnamon. Grab the bunt pan (be sure to actually use a bunt pan so it’ll cook, unlike my first attempt) and spray it with Pam. Put the butter and brown sugar in a microwavable safe bowl and heat for 70 seconds, pausing at 35 seconds to stir. Sprinkle enough walnuts to cover the bottom of the bunt pan, put 16 of the balls in the pan and drizzle half of the glaze on top of that. Now repeat in the same order.

Bake at 375 degrees for 30-35 minutes. Make sure it’s thoroughly cooked and there you’ll have it – cream cheese and chocolate monkey bread. Let’s hope it turned out better than mine did.