FoodThoughtsOfaChefWannabe: Guest Blog, if it can be "Veganized" SHE can do it! Vegan Monkey Bread

Nick, husband of Jessica, father of Riley and Georgia, and living legend of the vegan community in the making

A little over a year ago, I agreed to help my husband embark upon the great vegan experiment. It was a little rough in the beginning. There was a lot of Googling the ingredient lists, there are animal by products in damn near everything; and, it feels like manufactures’ are trying to hide that fact.

I am an adventurous cook, brash baker, and a big fan of eating food. I took it as a personal challenge to veganize what I could. If nothing else- to prove to my mother that this was a viable lifestyle. To be perfectly clear- I am not vegan; but, I am fairly busy with two babies and don’t want to make two meals all the time. So I go vegan during the week.

One fateful night I was scanning my favorite blogs, when I came across this lovely little recipe for monkey bread. It was really more of a cake, but I wasn’t going to hold that against the blogger. A quick scan of the ingredient list and I realized- I CAN VEGANIZE THIS! My poor husband had been left out of several great internet finds and now he was finally able to partake. Let me fill you in on how simple it was to make these face free.

Vegan Cinnamon Monkey Cake

You will need:
1-8oz. tub softened vegan cream cheese

1 ½ cups softened soy butter

2 ½ cups vegan sugar

2 tsp vanilla

3-4 containers of Pillsbury biscuits

2 TBSP cinnamon

1 ½ cups brown sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter up two 9 inch pans and set aside.

In a small pot or bowl, melt ½ c soy butter.

In a big Ziploc bag mix 1 c brown sugar and 1 c sugar, add cinnamon and shake it all up.

Remove biscuits and roll each one into a little 4 inch tube, then cut them into 4-5 pieces.

Drop the pieces in the butter. I used a slotted spoon to fish them out and drop them in the bag of sugar. Shake it , shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture.

Drop them casually into the well buttered cake pans.

Repeat until you’ve covered the bottoms of the pans fairly completely. I actually ran out of sugar and had to had about ½ c more of each kind of sugar and another good dash of cinnamon..

Take the remaining butter from the dipping process and melt 1 more stick with it. Add to that whatever sugar was left in the Ziploc bag and heat in a sauce pan. This bit is tricky because you want to stir it constantly until the sugar is just melted into the butter but not burn it.

Drizzle this delicious concoction evenly over your two pans.

Bake for about 30 minutes.

While that’s baking:

Make sure the burner is OFF!

In the same little sauce pan you melted your butter/brown sugar mixture- mix ½ c soy butter, vanilla, the tub of vegan cream cheese, and about 1 c. vegan sugar. Residual heat only here folks. With a whisk just whip the crap out of all those ingredients until you get a creamy smooth consistency. Finger dip tasting is the only way you’re going to know if you’ve added enough sugar. Once you’ve reached peak taste toss the pot into the fridge and let it rest and set up while you’re baking.

Pull your lovely cakes out of the oven. Loosen the sides with a spatula and turn them out onto plates. Take your frosting and spread a thin loose layer to be the middle. Top it with the second layer and coat it with the remaining frosting. At this point you should be DYING to eat the whole damn thing- so go for it!