{Shortcut} Butterscotch Monkey Bread Muffins

I've been planning on making monkey bread for Christmas morning a long time now. I had found recipes and an elaborate plan to make a full on monkey bread with yeasted brioche dough and homemade caramel completely from scratch. But as Christmas got nearer and I realized how much other stuff I had to do, I decided to save the more complicated monkey bread for another time and use some shortcuts. We popped open canned Pillsbury Grands buttermilk biscuit dough, cut it into pieces and rolled them into balls, as the basis of the monkey .

After our late night of present exchanging on Christmas Eve, we both just wanted to sleep in and make a quick (yet sweet and tasty breakfast for Christmas morning). After cutting the biscuit, we stuffed the balls into silicone Christmas cupcake molds (but you can just use a greased muffin tin). Then we combined a package of instant butterscotch pudding mix with a cup of brown sugar, one teaspoon of cinnamon, and 3/4 cup of milk to soak over the balls of biscuit dough. You will have lots of the sweet mixture leftover if you only use one can of dough like we did. I decided it would be wasteful to use more than one can when baking for just me and Dustin. That's why these were monkey bread muffins instead of traditionally shaped monkey bread. Bake for at least 15 minutes (we did a little less and some of the bottom dough balls were way undercooked).

While we pulled apart these sweet and gooey treats on the 25th, served alongside eggnog-spiked coffee, we watched It's A Wonderful Life and sang Christmas carols. It was hard to not be thankful for all of the wonderful things in our life right now!

It was a very Merry Christmas, indeed!

PS: the cheesecake from yesterday turned out spectacularly!