cinnamon sugar pull-apart bread

Welcome to my cinnamon sugar pull-apart bread adventure.

Advisory: There is a lot of sugar in this masterpiece.

A LOT.

But naturally, that’s what makes it so delicious. Mmmmm.

I found this recipe from my ultimate fave: Joy the Baker. THANKS, Joy! You totally rock.

Alright! Let’s start with our team:

You’re going to need flour, sugar, active dry yeast, salt, butter, milk, water, eggs, and vanilla for the dough. And then for the tasty sugary filling you’ll need a little more sugar (or who are we kidding, a LOT), ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, and melted butter.

First, I had to mix all the dry ingredients for the dough together. I whisked them up real good till it was all nice and fluffy.

On a side note: Just throw the packet of active dry yeast in without following the directions on the packet. I was a little confused here, because I make another bread where you need to add water and sugar to the yeast packet to “activate” the dry yeast, but after reading Joy’s directions several times I figured out that this need not be done for this recipe. Just throw the yeast in the bowl with all the other dry ingredients and call that part of the adventure a day.

Next I made a buttery, vanilla-y, milk mixture by melting 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter in a 1/3 cup of whole milk. After the butter and milk are good and blended I added 1/4 cup of water and a teaspoon of vanilla. Mmm I love vanilla.

After this, I added the dry ingredients with the eggs and the buttery, vanilla-y, milk mixture and stirred and stirred and stirred with a spatula until the dough was good and sticky. Joy says sticky is good.

Mine looked something like this:

Then I placed a clean towel over the bowl and then patiently waited for the dough to rise. This took about 1 hour. It was hard for me to wait, but I willed myself to do it.

While I was waiting ever so patiently I made the cinnamon sugar fulling and melted another 2 tablespoons of butter until it was semi-brown. I probably could have browned it even more than I did, but since I’d never browned butter before I was scared and didn’t want it to burn. Maybe burned is what Joy meant, but I don’t like burned tastes so I took precautions on this step.

There is my risen dough. Looks terrific if I do say so myself.

I rolled the dough out as shown and slathered on the melted butter and hefty sugar filling. It was an insane amount of sugar, but what Joy says, I do. Sugar, sugar, heaven. Then I sliced the dough into six equal-ish pieces, stacked them on top of each other and sliced the pile six more times.

From here I loaded the squares into a buttered and flowered loaf pan.

And just for the heck of it, I sprinkled on some extra sugar that tried to get away.

So. much. SUGAR.

And oh so worth it.

After this I had to let the dough rise in the bread pan for 40 or so more minutes. Then FINALLY (I know!) I baked it up. 30-35 minutes at 350 degrees and I had myself a masterpiece:

Tasty, tasty. This bread is amazing.

SOOOOO good!! It certainly wasn’t quick, but it’s worth it.

For a more detailed recipe and more delicious pictures of the cinnamon sugar pull-apart bread, visit Joy the Baker. She’s witty, and totally cool, and makes lots and lots of delicious treats to eat. Make something from her blog and you can thank me later. She never disappoints.