BAKED Sunday Mornings: Monkey Bubble Bread

Here we are at the third recipe in BAKED Sunday Mornings. Monkey Bubble Bread. I had made this years ago, using a different recipe that called for frozen bread dough. This time, the recipes calls for homemade yeast dough, which I was a little nervous about. I have no trouble making pizza dough from scratch- it always comes out great! However, I've usually had trouble making other yeast breads, like cinnamon rolls. The dough never seems to rise for me. I don't know why this happens. I was nervous it would happen this time, and it did- the dough never seemed to double in size, even though I let it rise in a warm place for longer than the time indicated in the recipe. I went ahead and continued to make the recipe, hoping for the best. As you can see in the picture above, I halved the recipe and made it in mini-loaf pans instead of a bundt pan. It smelled so good while baking in the oven- lots of butter, brown sugar and cinnamon! After taking the loaf pans out of the oven, I let them cool for a few minutes and then turned them out onto a plate.

Since I didn't use a bundt pan, my loaves fell apart a little bit, but still looked pretty good. However, I could tell as soon as I tasted one that there was something off. The dough was too dense, because it hadn't risen properly. Does anyone know what I may have done wrong? I know the recipe said to be very careful not to heat the milk up too much because that would kill the yeast. I didn't think my milk was too hot. Next time I make this recipe, I might just use room temperature milk and not heat it up at all. The Baked recipe is so well written and I do love monkey bread though, so I'm going to try this again!

If you want to see the recipe and read how the other members' recipes turned out, head on over to BAKED Sunday Mornings