Double Recipe Test: Homemade Marinara and Pepperoni Pull-Apart Bread

Pull-apart or "monkey" bread is a very popular pin. Usually it's a sweet variety, with cinnamon sugar, butter, and/or fruit. I liked the looks of this savory version from Confections of a Foodie Bride, where the bread is stuffed with cheese and pepperoni, and dipped in marinara.

Basically, you assemble some garlic butter, some pizza dough, cubes of mozzarella, and turkey pepperoni. Assemble into little balls, each coated with garlic butter. Bake in a bundt pan.

I happen to have a springform bundt pan, which was perfect. I decided to make all the little balls first, then coat them with butter all at once, because the recipe said that it gets difficult to seal them once your hands get all buttery.

The recipe also said to use about 2/3 oz. of dough per ball. I got out my scale and measured. It turned out to be bigger than the "marble-size" described, but I thought I would go with the weight instead of size. It didn't make nearly as many as described. The recipe said 48 balls, and I ended up with around 30. That should have been my first clue.

It all fit into the bundt pan just fine, though, and baked up nicely.

I also made a marinara sauce for dipping. I'm not a huge fan of canned pasta sauce, so I used this recipe for Giada's Homemade Marinara. It's based on the Food Network lady's recipe, but I found it pinned from Marble and Mud.

It's a very easy recipe. Finely chop and saute aromatics, add crushed tomatoes and herbs, simmer. Mine came together just fine. I ended up tossing it in the blender because my "finely chopped" was...not so fine. I just reheated it a bit after blending and it all worked out.  This pic is before blending. It would be perfectly fine as a pasta sauce at this consistency, but it needed a little smoothing out for dipping.

Dinner came together pretty well, the boys were all totally excited by the idea of pull-apart bread.

There was a problem, though. The same problem that plagued cupcake pizzas: a too-large dough-to-filling ratio. They ended up being very bready. Pizza dough dipped in marinara sauce isn't exactly a stellar dinner.

(Yes, that is a plastic tablecloth cover and a tumbler of wine. What?)

I think that the dough balls were too big at 2/3 oz. But if they were much smaller, I don't see how you could get them to seal correctly. I don't think I'll try this again, it's a fun concept, but I couldn't get it to turn out. The marinara was good, though, a nice go-to recipe.

Split verdict: Marinara = yum. Pull-apart bread = too doughy.

Beehive Bread

There are quite a few beehive bread pins on Pinterest, I pinned this one from disneyfamily.com (warning: this site plays extremely annoying and difficult-to-silence audio ads).

It's a sweet, orange-flavored yeast-bread formed into twisted ropes and would around a greased bowl for baking.

Here's the key instruction:

Divide dough into 16 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a rope about 24 inches long. Twist two ropes together and wind around foil covered bowl from the bottom. Repeat with remaining pieces, pinching ends together until bowl is covered and resembles a beehive.

Twist any remaining ropes into smaller beehives and set on tray with larger bread. Let bread rise for 20 minutes. 

 I decided this would be a perfect Easter brunch bread, and picked out a variety of bowls to try.

I was thinking that the larger bowl would be the main bread, and the smaller ones for any extra dough. When I got it all done, though, the dough didn't even cover the larger bowl completely.

It looked great, though. From the front.

The back - not so much. I think in the future I'll try fewer, longer ropes to avoid the awkward joins. 

The problem joins became worse with baking. Again, from the front it looked fine, from the back it was sort of a mess.

  

It tasted fantastic, though. It was perfect for Easter, and my guests ate just about every bite. The kids were huge fans.  It's a sweet, not-particularly-healthful bread, so it's best for a special occasion.

The shaping could be fixed, I think, with thinner ropes. I'll also try smaller bowls to reduce sagging caused by the weight of the dough. Maybe 3 cereal-bowl sized molds instead of the large one.

Verdict: Delicious, and with a little tinkering it could be really pretty too.

Double Recipe Test: Cupcake Pizzas and Pizza Dough

This is a meta-Pinterest blog post. This recipe for cupcake pizzas is from a food and craft blog called All My Great Ideas Are Really From Pinterest.

The pin I used had a caption saying that cupcake tins would work as well as muffin tins. The recipe calls for Pillsbury refrigerated pizza dough, and just "pizza sauce."

I wanted to do a homemade dough so I could use partly whole wheat flour. So I used the dough recipe from this Pizza Hut Personal Pizzas from cdkitchen. It gets pinned a lot too.

The cupcake pizza recipe was pretty obvious: layer dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, and bake.

The dough recipe was also easy: mix ingredients, knead, divide into portions, let rise in the pan, top and bake.  I deviated a bit from the recipe, but nothing to major. I used half whole wheat flour and I skipped the powdered milk. I also skipped the NINE OUNCES of oil. That's just waaaaay too much.

Anyway, I used cupcake tins, and here's what my risen dough looked like:

The recipe made a LOT of dough. Perhaps more than I needed? This is how they looked topped:

As you can see, I worked in some veggies. I used Classico fire-roasted tomato pizza sauce and regular old mozzarella. At this point, I was getting concerned about the dough-to-topping ratio. They came out of the oven looking like this:

You can see the problem: They look like dough muffins topped with a bit of cheese. Breaking one open confirmed it.

I guess if you used the more-than-a-cup of oil that the dough recipe called for, or bigger muffin or cake tins, or just a smaller amount of dough per cup, this might taste good. But this version was way too bread-y, and didn't really seem like a satisfying dinner. It was like eating a half loaf of bread with a little tomato sauce and cheese. The guys were not pleased.


I don't think I'll be making these again. They don't offer any improvement over plain old round pizza in a pizza pan.


Verdict: Pizza night should be a treat, and these aren't really all that special.