Kitchen Classroom 2021: Week 18

This week’s Kitchen Classroom is a Weekend Project! The whole family can work together to make a batch of sweet, gooey, Monkey Bread that’s ready for sharing as part of brunch, for dessert, or during game night or movie night. While the dough rises, kids can use their math knowledge and skills to solve some word problems and then learn about the world of tear-and-share breads in Take It Further. 

Don’t forget to share what your family makes by tagging @testkitchenkids or using #ATKkids on Instagram, or by sending photos to kids@americastestkitchen.com. Visit the America’s Test Kitchen Kids website for more culinary content designed especially for kids, plus all of the Kitchen Classroom content in one easy-to-scan location. 

Here’s what’s cooking for the week of May 3rd through 9th, 2021.

This sweet, shareable recipe takes balls of pizza dough (homemade or store-bought); rolls them in butter, cinnamon, and sugar; and bakes them into a sticky-sweet loaf. Monkey Bread is traditionally served warm so that the sticky baked pieces can be pulled apart. 
[GET THE RECIPE]

What You’ll Need
½ cup packed light brown sugar
1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
⅛ teaspoon ground nutmeg
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
Vegetable oil spray
1 pound pizza dough, room temperature
⅓ cup confectioners’ sugar
2 teaspoons milk

Learning Moment
Math (Addition and Subtraction):
This recipe makes one batch of Monkey Bread that’s comprised of 36 balls of dough. As they wait for the dough to rise in step 4, challenge kids to solve the following addition and subtraction problems.

• If you and your brother are making Monkey Bread together and you each rolled 8 balls of dough so far, how many balls of dough do you need to roll to finish your Monkey Bread?
  (Answer: 8 + 8 = 16 balls of dough rolled. 36 total balls of dough needed - 16 rolled balls of dough = 20 balls of dough left to roll)
• If you eat 4 balls of Monkey Bread, your mom eats 3, and your sister eats 6, how many balls of Monkey Bread have been eaten? How many are left in the loaf?  
  (Answer: 4 + 3 + 5 = 12 balls of Monkey Bread eaten. 36 - 12 = 24 balls of Monkey Bread left in the loaf)
• If you made 2 batches of Monkey Bread to share with friends, how many balls of dough total do you need to roll?
  (Answer 36 balls of dough + 36 balls of dough = 72 balls of dough) 

Bonus Question:
If it takes you 30 seconds to roll and dip 1 ball of dough, how many minutes will it take you to roll all 36 balls of dough for your Monkey Bread?
(Answer: 30 seconds = 0.5 minute; 0.5 minute x 36 balls = 18 minutes)

Take It Further
General Knowledge:
Ask kids to guess how Monkey Bread got its name. Explain that the name “monkey” refers to how you eat this sweet treat—with your hands. Here’s some history behind this fun, shareable snack.

Monkey bread is sometimes also called tear-and-share or bubble bread—they’re all different names for the same kind of dish: balls of dough, baked close together in a pan, that are served warm and pulled apart with your hands. While there are lots of savory tear-and-share breads, its roots are sweet. In the 1950s, a Hungarian dessert called aranygaluska (“golden dumplings” in Hungarian), a cinnamon-flavored, pull-apart coffee cake, became popular in America. Today, many Americans refer to a similar recipe, made of yeasted dough balls coated in butter, cinnamon, and sugar, as “monkey bread.”  

Looking for a savory tear-and-share bread? Check out our cheesy Tear-and-Share Pepperoni Pizza Rolls.

Catching up on Kitchen Classroom? Find previous weeks using the links below:

• Kitchen Classroom 2021: Week 17
• Kitchen Classroom 2021: Week 16
• Kitchen Classroom 2021: Week 15
• Kitchen Classroom 2021: Week 14
• Kitchen Classroom 2021: Week 13