Bread and Butter Pudding

I’ll confess that I’m not much a sweet-eater myself. But that works out well, because I love to bake, and this way I’m not tempted to eat everything I make. Instead, I can give it away to others.

I was skimming through a food magazine when M caught sight of a picture in it. “Mmmm,” she moaned. Wondering what pleased my girlfriend so much, I looked. It was a recipe for bread and butter pudding.

I’ve actually never made that before, and when I went to the store to get the ingredients, I was rather embarrassed to be seen buying white bread. I’m a whole-wheat-and-seeded type, which perhaps makes sense given my vegetarian ways and my health-consciousness. But I figured I was buying this white bread to make something nice for M, and that was okay. Although I did put one of those heavy-duty loaves of organic rye bread in my shopping trolley as well, just to feel a bit better about it.

I changed the recipe in the magazine quite a bit. It called for nutmeg and whole milk, neither of which I like, and I added raisins and cinnamon. I also baked it for less time than was called for, and that turned out to be a good thing, because when I served it to M, she said she liked the soggy pieces underneath best. I liked the crunchy pieces on top, so that shows that at the very least, M and I are suited to eating bread and butter pudding together.

This was a soothing treat for a rainy, chilly afternoon. It was great to be able to turn the oven on when M came home and to have the flat get suffused with the smell of vanilla and cinnamon. Even if I did keep thinking about the breadandbutterfly in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There!

Ingredients:
butter
.25-.5 cup raisins (or a hefty handful)
6 slices of white bread (apparently stale works well)
35 g sugar (since I don’t like weighing ingredients, this is about 1/8 of a cup)
1 whole egg and 1 yolk (if you double this recipe, use 1 whole egg and 3 yolks, for an extra-rich custard)
1 vanilla pod
300 ml double cream
cinnamon
raw/demerara sugar

Instructions:

1. Butter the pan.
2. Boil some water and soak the raisins in it for 5-10 minutes, so they get plump.
3. Cut the crusts off the bread and butter the slices. Then slice each piece on the diagonal, so you have 12 triangles.
4. Layer the bread in the pan in two rows, with the points facing towards the top, and place drained raisins in between the layers. Sprinkle any remaining raisins over the bread, but remember that they might get burned during baking.
5. Beat the eggs with the sugar in a mixing bowl and set aside.
6. Split the vanilla pod and place it in a pot along with the double cream. Warm the cream over a medium flame, without letting it boil.
7. Remove the vanilla pod, scraping out the seeds as you do so, putting them in the warm cream. Save the vanilla pod for another use, such as making vanilla sugar.
8. Slowly pour the cream into the egg mixture, whisking the entire time.
9. Pour the custard over the bread. Leave this to stand for 15-30 minutes, so the bread really soaks up the custard.
10. Sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on top.
11. Bake for 25-35 minutes at 180 C. Check after 25 minutes and if you want a crunchier topping, bake for longer.
12. Serve, but be careful because the raisins will be very hot and could burn you.