Thursday, January 27, 2011

Orange Marmalade Bread Pudding


Since I now have buckets of marmalade in my fridge, I found a useful way to get rid of stale bread and cream approaching the use-by date-bread pudding. I never hear complaints about bread pudding.

Some people butter the bread before making a bread pudding. You don't need to do that. You can, but I don't bother. You can be all fancy and spread the marmalade on each slice of bread before fitting it into the pan as well-guess what I did? I must have looked at ten different recipes on the web, and every single one of them did the buttering the bread thing. I know there are only so many things you can do with a bread pudding, but I'm going to go out on a limb and break with tradition-not because of some need to be different, or because I feel this recipe is somehow superior to all others by the omission of butter...but because I am too bloody tired to stand and butter slices of bread. I've been canning and attempting to teach fractions to a six year old all day. I. Can't. Butter. Bread. So there.

The bread I had was a sourdough raisin/cinnamon swirl loaf. Danny was getting kind of bored with cinnamon toast every morning for a week, so I showed the kid some mercy, and used the last of it for this pudding. He's a toast and tea for breakfast kind of guy, with the occasional break for porridge-but even the most devoted cinnamon toast eaters get tired of the same slice morning after morning. It was sort of a large loaf. Anyway, you could certainly make this with whatever bread you have sitting on the counter going stale (except maybe rye-I don't think that would be very nice, unless it was a Limpa rye).


You Will Need:

Enough thickly cut cubes of stale bread to fill a 9x11 casserole dish (or whatever you have-just leave room for it to expand).

Marmalade (about 1 cup)
4 large eggs
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
(See why I say you don't need to butter the bread?)

Sugar for sprinkling the top because the marmalade doesn't already have an unbelievable amount of sugar in it.

Fit the bread in the dish. Pour the marmalade over it. In a bowl, whisk the eggs, milk, cream together until smooth. Pour over the bread. Cover, and let it sit in the fridge at least 30 minutes, but as long as a couple hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Sprinkle with a bit of sugar. Bake pudding about 1 hour or until done.

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