🌳 A baobab fruit 🍞 A sticky pastry

monkey bread

3.1

A sweet pull-apart pastry of baked dough pieces coated in butter, sugar and cinnamon

noun
/ˈmʌŋki brɛd/

: pan de mono

I baked a delicious monkey bread for dessert, and it was a hit at the party.

Examples

At the café we shared a warm slice of monkey bread with coffee and fresh fruit.
For the holidays she always makes monkey bread, a sticky pull-apart pastry everyone loves.
He baked monkey bread using sweet dough rolled in cinnamon and brown sugar for guests.
I love making monkey bread for brunch.
Have you ever tried monkey bread?
The monkey bread we shared at the brunch was perfectly sweet and warm, making it a delightful treat.
After dinner, everyone enjoyed tearing off pieces of monkey bread dipped in melted butter.

How Sweet

sticky bun

5 1.3

monkey bread

3.1

cinnamon roll

5 1.0

brioche

7 6.7

hard roll

1 2.1

Surface Forms

monkey bread singular

monkey breads plural

Morphology

monkey + bread

The head noun 'bread' signals the lexical category (a baked product), so a learner would infer it is some kind of bread/pastry, but the specific sense — a sweet, pull-apart, cinnamon-coated pastry — is not predictable from 'monkey' and is essentially an arbitrary or conventional name. Because part of the meaning (that it is a bread) is recoverable but the detailed culinary sense is not, it is best classified as semi-transparent.

Etymology

Monkey bread may come from the way you eat the pastry: small dough pieces are stuck together and pulled apart with your fingers, like a monkey picking at bread. So the name came to mean 'a sticky pull-apart pastry'.