Upgrade Canned Biscuits With A Coat Of Cinnamon Sugar

In the food world, one pervasive myth is that everyone has all kinds of leisure time on weekends to prepare great big elaborate breakfast feasts (and the rest of the day to lapse into a food coma and digest them, one presumes). Well, in reality, many of us are just as busy on weekends as we are on weekdays, so if we can spare any time at all for an indulgent morning meal it's likely to involve a few shortcuts like canned biscuits. Even so, biscuits straight out of the cardboard tube can be a little plain, so we're all about different ways to dress them up as long as they take under five minutes.

One of the simplest ways we know to upgrade canned biscuits involves simply dunking them in melted butter (or margarine, if you must) and then rolling them in cinnamon sugar to coat them. Bake them as usual, then enjoy sweet, cinnamony biscuits for breakfast. If you want to cut down on the calories, you can even separate the biscuits into thinner layers or cut them into quarters to make bite-sized biscuit chunks. Once they are baked, plop them on a plate and eat them. As an optional garnish, you may sprinkle them generously with your choice of adjectives. Call them sweet, pillowy, fluffy, crunchy, ambrosial, orgasmic, or utterly life-changing, as you wish, but that's on you — we make no claims other than saying that these cinnamon sugar-dipped biscuits taste like biscuits, cinnamon, and sugar.

If the idea of cutting up canned biscuits, dunking them in butter, and rolling them in cinnamon sugar sounds familiar, that's because it's the basis of many a no-knead monkey bread recipe. Of course, you need not leave it at that as you can add other ingredients like chopped nuts, coconut, chocolate chips, or a box of pudding mix (we have a monkey bread recipe that adds butterscotch pudding to the basic cinnamon sugar mix we started out with).

Monkey bread is something that typically requires a bundt pan to make, but if you're bundtless, you need not feel too left out. You can instead take your canned biscuits and smoosh and flatten them into one big rectangle, then spread it with butter and cinnamon sugar. For a more caramelly flavor, use brown sugar instead of white. Roll up the dough into a tube, slice it into spirals, and bake these quick and easy cinnamon rolls until they get all puffy. If you feel that no cinnamon roll is complete without a topping, you can make a simple glaze from powdered sugar thinned with milk or, you can add butter, cream cheese, salt, and vanilla to those same ingredients to make a thicker, tangier cream cheese frosting.