I was inspired to make bread pudding after having an experience that I’m sure many of you can relate to. You land yourself some nice bread and for a few days you eat it at every possible moment. It’s fresh, it’s chewy, it’s delicious, you love it. Then a couple days or so go by. You come back to your bread and SURPRISE it’s hard as a rock. Literally. So hard that it could be a Colonel Mustard bludgeoned with my old stale bread in the music room kind of situation. We’ve all been there. And it sucks because now you’ve got murdering bread on your hands and no idea what to do with it. I got mine from a nice little bread making workshop I went to a whopping two weeks ago. The bread didn’t sit out that long thankfully, just long enough to turn from freshly baked baguette to baseball bat. After I realized it was at the point of no return I decided that instead of feeding it to birds or composting it, I was going to make bread pudding with it! I had never made bread pudding before but heck, it seemed easy enough! Weeeeeell it was! Super easy and super delicious. Lucky me

So yeah, I’ve never made bread pudding but I’ve eaten plenty of it so I had a good idea of what it’s supposed to be like. The first step was the wrestle my baguette down into small cubes. This involved some brute force, a sharp knife, and some smack talking. Eventually I got it down into manageable pieces and moved on to the next step. I like my bread pudding to be super moist and custardy. Soooo I opted to put lots of liquids in mine.

After I mixed my liquids I decided I’d let my bread soak for a bit to absorb some moisture and get less brick like. It took me about ten minutes to stir everything together and another ten minutes for my bread to soak. So far so good.

After the bread had soaked and the oven had preheated it was time to get cookin. I mixed in some raisins at this point cause really what is bread pudding without raisins?!? Got it into a nice baking pot thing (its round and ceramic, I have no idea what you call it) and threw it into da oven!

With my pudding in the oven I had about an hour to kill. I checked on it periodically to stir it and push the bread down so it didn’t all float to the top and burn/dry out. While I wasn’t stirring/poking my baking pudding I watched Best Thing I Ever Ate (best show on television, hands down) and endured endless abuse at the hands of my roommate and visiting friend. Apparently I’m too into food and not into Justin Bieber enough/at ALL. BUT whatever Best Thing I Ever Ate is definitely my favorite tv show. It’s so cool! They eat awesome stuff and tell you where you can eat it. It’s good inspiration for food ideas and also it makes me want to go on road trips. Yum. Anyways, after about an hour my pudding was set and ready to come out of the oven!

I had bought some ice cream to serve with my pudding and eagerly dished some out for myself and my roomies/pal. It was moist, sweet, and delicious. Everything bread pudding should be!

Bread Pudding

• 3 cups stale bread cubes
• 2 cups milk
• 4 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 2/3 cup brown sugar*
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 1/2 cup raisins

Preheat oven to 350ºF. In a large bowl mix milk, eggs, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, brown sugar, white sugar, and butter. Add bread to batter and mix so that all the bread is coated in batter. Let sit for about 10-20 minutes depending on how stale bread is. Don’t let it get too soft or it will turn to mush. After bread has soaked add in raisins and stir to combine. Grease a baking pan and pour in batter. Stir again to make sure raisins are evenly distributed. Bake for about 50 minutes or until pudding is set. Serve hot with ice cream.