Mexican Chorizo Monkey Bread

I love the color the avocado gives this!

Thanks to the folks on pinterest, I've recently been exposed to images of monkey bread. For those of you who have not been sucked into the addictive world of pinterest, let me explain.

Traditional monkey bread can be described as a cinnamon roll cake. Little balls of dough are covered in cinnamon sugar and baked inside of a loaf pan, cake pan, or bundt pan. When it comes out, the little balls stick together, but can be pulled apart easily instead of slicing. I've never eaten traditional monkey bread, but it sounds pretty delicious.

The variety that I've seen on pinterest most often is pizza monkey bread. In this incarnation, the dough balls are stuffed with mozzarella and pepperoni and then dipped in marinara sauce. This seemed like an excellent ideas, but  I didn't have pepperoni and I did have some pretty tasty Mexican ingredients. My variation is a little bit different, stuffed with Mexican chorizo, corn, onion, tomato, cream cheese, avocado, and mozzarella. I made some cumin sour cream to dip it in.

I'm lazy and have thus far in my life not had a whole lot of success with yeast-based doughs. Maybe someday I'll spend the time to perfect my baking skills, but for now I've discovered that store bought bread dough can be used in many ways. For this recipe, I got two tubes of the Pillsbury french bread loaves. I think I would prefer something that rises a little bit more, but essentially it worked pretty well.

Mexican Chorizo Monkey Bread 

Ingredients 

1 lb Mexican Chorizo (this is the soft, uncooked kind found with other sausages in the meat department)
1 onion, chopped
1/2 cup frozen corn

budnt pans are cool 'cause they give you a place to put dip

6 oz low fat cream cheese
1 avocado chopped into small pieces
about a cup mozzarella cheese in 1/2 inc cubes
2 tubes Pillsbury french bread loaves

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350.

Remove the chorizo from its casing and cook over medium high heat, chopping into tiny pieces as you go. Add in the onion and cook until translucent. Add the corn and cream cheese until the corn is defrosted and cream cheese is melted. Remove from heat.

Cut about 2" thick slices of bread dough and roll out into a circle. Put a cube of cream cheese, about 1/2 tsp of avocado, and 1 tsp of chorizo filling in the center. Pull up the sides and squeeze together to seal. I made mine into half circle shapes like a pirogi because it was the easiest way to seal them.

Place the sealed bundles in the bottom of a greased bundt pan.

Bake about 35 minutes until it begins to brown. Slide out on to a plate and serve upside down so the brown edges that were touching the inside of the pan face upwards. I put a ramekin with about 1/2 cup of sour cream mixed with 1tsp of ground cumin the center for dipping.

I really enjoyed these. The mozzarella melts and gets gooey, and the cream cheese helps keep the rest of the filling together. Keeping the avocado uncooked until putting it in makes for bursts of avocado flavor. The presentation is really fun and it's still easy to eat.

As we ate, Nathan looked at me and said "you could put any kind of filling in these" and I said "yup!". I'd definitely make these or a variation on them again.