mix, mix…stir, stir

Bread pudding is traditionally all about leftovers, specifically using day-old bread. I purchased a beautiful loaf of challah bread for this pudding, but honored the roots of bread pudding by incorporating other leftovers.

I haven’t made many bread puddings, so I don’t have much to compare this recipe to in a head-to-head bread pudding sort of way, but as far as a dessert goes, it was really delicious, custardy, moist, and chocolaty. It was also easy. I did “stale” my fresh loaf of challah bread before making the recipe by baking the cubed bread in a 300 degree F oven until they were nice and dried out. This is a technique I use for French toast as well; dried out bread soaks up more of the custard and makes for a moist delicious result. If you haven’t staled your French toast bread, you definitely need to give it a try, and challah bread makes excellent French toast! Enough about toast, back to pudding.

Now that I’m baking every week I seem to accumulate little containers of leftovers like chocolate sauce, spiced sugar, nut filling, and I am always looking for ways to use them up. Bread pudding is a perfect place to incorporate these odds and ends, so I skipped over adding raisins and decided to use up some finely chopped walnuts and pine nuts that were mixed with spiced sugar. After sifting out the sugar I had ½ cup of chopped nuts, so in they went. I used the spiced sugar I sifted out of the nuts and added a different batch of spiced sugar left over from making crystallized ginger to get the ½ cup needed. I wasn’t too worried about what spices were in the sugar because any mixture would be tasty in the bread pudding and I knew it would be a background flavor rather than a dominating element. The spiced sugar worked perfectly, adding a nice subtle hint of cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, ginger and who knows what else. The hint of spice added slightly to the aroma and came through as a finishing flavor to each bite. The nuts also worked nicely adding a little crunchy texture to the otherwise soft cakey, custardy structure of the dessert.

After tasting this custardy-chocolaty-bready delight, I knew I needed to disperse the goods before I found myself standing over an empty pan with a fork in my hand wondering what happened to all the bread pudding. I chilled it overnight and was very pleased that when cut it held its shape really well and after thorough testing determined it was stable enough to be picked up and eaten by hand. To dress up each pudding cake, I dipped the tops in the chocolate glaze left over from the Amaretti torte I made a few days earlier.

Thank you to Lauren of Upper East Side Chronicle for selecting the recipe for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking assignment, and giving me the perfect opportunity to use up three different leftover items. If you have some leftovers just waiting to become bread pudding, you can find the recipe on Lauren’s blog.

I, along with over 350 other baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 70 recipes completed 151 to go!