Sunday Breakfast

Sunday morning seems to me to be the best time for intricate breakfasts. While I'll eat breakfast any time any place, if I'm going to cook a multi-step breakfast, it's going to be on Sunday. It seems to start the week off on the best foot possible.

This past Sunday, I decided to make an ancient recipe; Graham Pull-apart Breakfast Ring. It's quite simple to make and is, in reality, a modified version of traditional Monkey Bread.

You start with a mix of brown sugar, cinnamon and crushed graham cereal. I use Golden Grahams. I'm not sure there's any other graham cereal out there anymore so this may be your only option. This cereal is rarely on sale so when it was $2.00 for the big box at the end of June, I snapped one up intending to make this.

You'll need 2 8 ounce tubes of biscuit dough. That's hard to find now, the non-grand-size biscuits. I wound up buying a 4-pack.

Turn the oven on to 375. Make the topping for the bread. It's 1 1/2 cups crushed cereal, 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar and 3/4 teaspoon cinnamon. That gets mixed well. While you are crushing the cereal and mixing the topping, melt 1/3 cup of butter.

Once the butter is melted, separate the biscuits. The recipe called for a 6-cup ring mold. I don't have one of those so I used a tart pan.

Dip the biscuit in the butter and then in the topping, placing it into the pan. The pan does not have to be greased or floured. The recipe called for snipping the biscuits in half. That would be okay if I had a ring mold, but because I don't have one that size, I left them whole. All but 4 biscuits fit into the bottom of the pan. Those 4, I scattered about the top.

Put the whole thing in the oven for 15-20 minutes. If you look at it at 15 minutes and the biscuits don't look done, i.e. golden brown, leave it in the oven for another 5 minutes. Mine looked like this at 18 minutes.

If you're using a ring mold, the recipe tells you to invert it onto another plate to cool. I left mine in the pan. Let cool for about 5 minutes and serve.

While this was baking, I sliced strawberries. They are so fresh right now and the organic ones are so close in price to the mass grown ones that I can justify buying those. I served the biscuits with the sliced strawberries, a tall glass of orange juice and my Sunday morning pills. Those you can omit.

Some observations:  It's been years, years, since I made this recipe. The measurements I presented above are from the recipe but were wasteful in the amount of material they made. I think you can, if you go the route of the whole biscuit and only do the tops, cut down the topping to 1 cup of crushed cereal, 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, and still have enough topping to cover your biscuits. Bear in mind, the topping is crumbly and is, therefore, messy. It's just like a streusal. I think you can also cut down the amount of butter you melt for dipping. I don't know if 1/4 cup will be enough but 1/3 cup was too much. I can't use it for anything else so I wound up tossing it and the extra topping out which, when one is pinching pennies, is tough.

I have quite a few biscuits left so I put them into bags of 4. I doubt they would freeze well but it's great to add them to lunch of for a snack or, as I did this morning, have a bag of 4 and yogurt for breakfast.

Let me know if you try this. You probably could make it with the Grands biscuits. You'd just need to modify the ingredients.

Beverage:  Darjeeling tea

Deb