Split Personality Bread Pudding

The other day, while sorting through a cookie tin full of old recipes that I had copied from various places and scribbled onto scrap pieces of paper, I came across one for bread pudding. I love bread pudding. So does my family. And since we haven’t eaten any for a while, I thought I would try my hand at making one. The weather this past week has also been perfect for bread pudding. There’s nothing quite like eating warm comfort food on a cool rainy day.

I have never made bread pudding before. Yes, another first. Hmmm… it has been a week of kitchen firsts hasn’t it? The recipe looked really simple and it was. It was just a matter of soaking cubes of slightly stale bread into a custard mixture of brown sugar, eggs, evaporated milk and fresh milk.

As usual, I wanted to experiment with different tastes and had a hard time deciding what exactly I was going to do. I wanted to make a bread pudding using raisin cinnamon bread, and I also wanted to try white bread with toasted almond flakes. But I didn’t want to make two bread puddings. So, I made one – with both types of bread. A sort of split personality bread pudding I guess.

For the custard: ½ cup (I think I would prefer slightly less the next time) packed brown sugar was whisked together with 2 eggs. Then, 1 cup of low fat (1.5%) evaporated milk and ½ cup 1.5% fresh milk were added, together with 1½ teaspoons of pure vanilla extract, and whisked to mix. I decided to skip the cinnamon and nutmeg that the recipe called for, as the raisin bread already had cinnamon and I wanted to see what the white bread would taste like without these flavorings and just almond flakes. But of course, I then promptly forgot to add the almond flakes to the white bread mixture!

I divided the custard/pudding mixture into two and added one type of bread cubes to each. (4 cups of bread cubes in total). These were left to sit for about 5 minutes, before going into a 175C oven for 50 minutes, or until the bread has puffed up and turned a deep golden brown. Mine was done in just over 45 minutes - the skewer inserted into the center already came out clean. The bread was a gorgeous golden brown.

I walked away to get my camera to take a picture of the beautifully puffed up pudding. On the way, I stopped to take care of something. I returned to the kitchen 5 minutes later to find that the entire pudding had “sunk” !! Horrors! What happened?! Are bread puddings supposed to do that?? Or maybe I should have left it in the oven to cool slightly first before removing it. Perhaps my impatience caused the “collapse”. Have to find out what happened there…

Regardless, it tasted pretty good. I sprinkled the forgotten almond flakes onto the white bread pudding before serving, and that was very good! Strangely though, the white bread pudding tasted sweeter than the raisin bread pudding. I wasn’t expecting that. If anything, I would have thought the latter would come out sweeter, as the raisin bread is in itself sweeter than the white bread.

Bread pudding on a rain-soaked day… what could be better?

Happy bread pudding-ing!

[Update (23/12/03): It just occurred to me that a possible reason why the bread pudding "sunk" after being removed from the oven is that I didn't place the casserole on a baking tray filled with about 1" deep of water, before putting it into the oven. I think a lot of bread pudding recipes call for such a step. For some reason, the recipe I used did not - or maybe I had scribbled it down wrongly way back when...
I'm thinking also that placing the casserole in a shallow water bath so to speak would create a different (more custardy?) texture, rather than a more kueh-like (cakey) texture.
Not sure if the baking time would need to be adjusted if using the water bath. It should either be the same or maybe just a few minutes longer (?)
I'll have to try the recipe again to find out...]

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