Old Fashioned Bread Pudding

Did you make a giant loaf of Easter bread last week AND a full-size batch of hot cross buns? Do you now have more raisin-studded bread than you know what to do with, filling your kitchen and threatening to overpower you and your family if you eat anything that isn't a sandwich?

I have a solution for you!

Bread pudding gets such a bum wrap. If you can find it on the menu at a restaurant, it's inevitably pitted against such hard-to-resist sweets as flourless chocolate tortes, vanilla crème brulée, lemon panna cotta, or raspberry sorbet-- all lovely in their own right, and far more exciting then bread pudding sounds. But really, what could be better on a rainy spring night than a steamy teacup full of warm spiced bread pudding, straight from the oven? Spiced with cinnamon and raisins with a creamy, custard-like texture, this is the perfect comfort food, and a total upcycle at that.

There are a lot of recipes like this in the box: dishes that feature ingredients you'd have to throw away otherwise. These are the recipes that Eleanor saved and used over and over because they helped prevent unnecessary waste (including a recipe for mock apple pie that contains... you guessed it! No apples). Since the box was started during WWII when even the most basic foods were being rationed, I guess she became good at stretching her dollars-- and her pantry. Written in what I assume is Eleanor's own hand, the original recipe card for this includes the notation “(good)” at the top, underlined twice-- so you know it was a winner for her, too.

So don't throw away your next loaf of stale bread; get creative and make yourself a bread pudding. It's the perfect dessert for this time of year when the weather vacillates between warm and freezing (cold out? Serve this hot! Warm outside? Serve it chilled!), and it's versatile enough to be appropriate for breakfast or dessert (scoop a dollop of yoghurt on it for breakfast, or serve it with cream as a dessert!) Seriously, what are you waiting for?

This is the perfect recipe on which to use up the remnants of a sweet bread you have laying around (Hawaiian bread would be an absolute dream here!), but the original actually calls for plain sandwich bread, so that would work fine, too. I've included two different amounts of sugar below, depending on how sweet your bread is to start with.

The verdict:

4 spoons out of five. I'd give it five, but by the time I made this, I was so tired of bread that it was hard to muster up as much enthusiasm as this deserved.

The recipe:

Old Fashioned Bread Pudding

The ingredients:

6 slices stale bread (white or your choice of sweet breads)
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp cinnamon
Scant ½ c sugar (if using plain bread, add an additional 2 tbsp sugar)
½ c raisins (optional, but recommended as they definitely improve the texture and flavour)
4 eggs
2 c milk
1 tsp vanilla extract

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Grease an 8x8 (or 1 ½ quart) baking dish and set aside.
Cut crusts from bread and brush remaining bread with melted butter.
Sprinkle with cinnamon (and 2 tbsp sugar if you're using plain bread).
Cut bread into quarters (mine were more like cubes because my slices were thicker).
Arrange in layers in prepared dish, sprinkling each layer with raisins as you go.
In a separate bowl, beat eggs just until combined.
Add scant ½ c sugar, milk, and vanilla to eggs and stir until sugar is dissolved.
Pour egg mixture over bread.
Set dish in pan of 1 inch hot water and place in oven.
Bake 55-60 minutes until “silver knife inserted ½ inch into pudding comes out clean.”

This post also listed over at #InspireMe Wednesdays!

Hot Cross Buns

Easter 2012 was the first married holiday that Judson and I celebrated. It was barely a month into our marriage, and less than two weeks since we had returned from our honeymoon, and we were excited. I had never really heard of hot cross buns before that spring, except for as the first song I learned to play on both the recorder and the clarinet, and I definitely didn't know they were an Easter treat until the portion of our honeymoon that we spent in the UK. I guess it was close enough to Easter that all the cafes and coffeeshops we passed on the street seemed to be advertising them, and I was fascinated, as I tend to be by anything that's covered in frosting.

So when we returned to the US and were invited to an Easter brunch, I knew exactly what we would make. Hot cross buns! We'd be so domestic! We'd be the envy of the party! People would finally stop teasing Judson about having an empty fridge throughout his bachelorhood! We'd be so adorable when we arrived with a cloth-covered basket full of steaming rolls, people would fall all over themselves just to be friends with us. I'd dole out advice like Martha Stewart on complicated topics like proofing yeast and the best type of dried fruit to use when making Easter desserts, and it would be the official beginning of our grown-up lives together!

So Easter weekend came, and we stayed in on Saturday night to make the buns. I found an authentic recipe on a British website, we made the dough on Saturday evening and set it aside to rise all night. Sunday morning I sneaked out of bed early to punch down the dough and set it up for a second rise, then preheated the oven and jumped in the shower. Judson awoke sometime while I was in the shower, and attempted to put the buns in the preheated oven... but when he opened the oven, it was ice cold.

He came to tell me the news, and I panicked. Dripping wet out of the shower, we stood in the middle of the kitchen panicking. In general, I pride myself on keeping calm when cooking disasters happen-- I mean, unless you've lit something on fire that wasn't supposed to be on fire, the worst that can happen is that you order takeout and have a good story to tell later. But this was our first married holiday, and we were going to spend it with new friends and their friends, who we had never met, and everyone there was married and had kids except for us, and we wanted so badly to not have everything screwed up, but, there we were.

It turned out our oven, which we had not yet used (I moved into the house the week before we got married, Judson moved in after our honeymoon, and we had only been home for a week), was non-functional. I hesitate to say “broken” because I'm not sure it actually ever worked. We had a terrible landlord who didn't really care much about the condition of the house, and I was irate that we now had no oven, and when we called to tell him about it, he said he'd get us a new one in “a week or two.”

But it ended up being the first (albeit minor) catastrophe we had to navigate as husband and wife: Judson dealt with our landlord (this was already not the first major issue we had with the place) while I mixed up frosting, formed the dough into buns, and texted our hostess to see if she could spare some space in the oven. (Huge faux pas, I know, but what were we gonna do? We lived in Atlanta, it's not like there were grocery stores where we could go buy store-brand hot cross buns on Easter morning).

This is the only piece of Eleanor's Pyrex Collection that still exists, and I wish I had more of it. At least if only one piece survived, it was the biggest mixing bowl ever.

So, slightly worse for wear but still alive and kicking, we showed up at our first married function with a tray full of raw dough and a bowl of glaze, which I cooked side-by-side with the Easter ham, thanks to the flexibility of our adorable hosts, who never made me feel bad about it. Keeping track of the oven when you're cooking two things at once is tricky at best, though, and the buns turned out a little browner than they should have been, and a little too chewy from being transported across town, but all in all they were still mostly edible. But I've had my eye on hot cross buns ever since-- I've got unfinished business with them and always knew I'd have to cross that bridge again, this time with a fully functional kitchen.

Oh, and that oven? The landlord replaced it with one he bought from a junkyard, which didn't bother us because it was in good shape and appeared to be new. We tested it to make sure it worked before our landlord left the building after he installed it, and everything seemed to be in order... until the first time we tried to use it to cook a frozen pizza, preheated it as normal, opened it to put in the pizza, and realised that it had no racks. A seemingly small detail, but without it you can't use an oven. So we were back to square one. The landlord raced over with, I kid you not, a cooling rack and two bricks wrapped in aluminum foil and tried to convince us to use that contraption instead of forcing him to buy yet another oven. And I fell in love with Judson just a little bit more when he put his foot down and refused, forcing the landlord to purchase us a new oven (from a real store, no less!), so that, by the time we had been married 6 weeks, we had already gone through three ovens-- more, I think, than my Eleanor and Wilbur probably went through in their entire marriage.

So without further ado, here is the recipe for hot cross buns that I found in Eleanor's recipe box. You should make these this weekend. People will be impressed, and if you're in doubt, just look at it this way: it's impossible for you to have a worse time making these than I did three Easters ago.

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. These buns are pretty easy: it's a one-bowl recipe with only one rise necessary, and since you make the buns in a muffin tin, there's not even any of that pesky shaping of the dough that always ends up with me covered in stickiness. Make these for Easter Sunday and have them with your coffee. Even if you leave out the raisins, you won't regret it.

The recipe:

Hot Cross Buns

The Ingredients:

2 ¼ tsp yeast
¼ c water, lukewarm
2 1/3 c flour, divided
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp soda
1 c sour cream
1 egg
¼ c raisins
½ c candied citrus peel, chopped
1 tsp cinnamon
1 c confectioner's sugar
1 tbsp milk
½ tsp vanilla

THE DIRECTIONS:

Grease a 12-cup muffin tin and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl or bowl of a stand mixer, dissolve yeast in the hot water.
Add 1 1/3 c flour, sugar, salt, soda, sour cream, and egg and mix 30 seconds on low speed, then 2 minutes on high speed, or “300 strokes by hand,” scraping down sides frequently.
Add remaining 1 c flour, raisins, peel, and cinnamon and mix thoroughly.
Divide batter evenly among muffin cups and set in a warm place to rise.
Batter will rise slightly but not double.
Preheat oven to 176C/350F and bake 20 minutes until golden brown.
While buns are cooling, mix together confectioner's sugar, milk, and vanilla into a quick glaze.
Once buns are completely cooled, frost a cross on the top of each with glaze.
Allow to set and serve with breakfast, brunch, or Easter lunch.

Yields 12 muffin-sized buns.

This post also featured as part of The #WeeklyVenture Linkup over here.

Easter Bread, or, Sweet Breakfast Bread with Raisins

My mom doesn't tell many stories about her childhood, which is weird, because all of the things I know about it are awesome: her pets included a snapping turtle (which she fed by spearing raw beef on the end of a pencil), a mouse, and a de-scented skunk, and for awhile her family kept chickens in their suburban Florida backyard (whose eggs my mom refused to eat because, and I'm quoting her here, “they came from a chicken butt”).

Eleanor and her son, my Uncle Jimmy, on Easter sunday 1960. I like to think my mom is not pictured because she was still rejoicing over her found pet mouse.

Anyway, one of the few stories I know from her childhood is the story of how her pet mouse escaped one Easter morning, and my mom refused to get ready for church until they found it. Irritated, no doubt, by the prospect of being late to Easter services, Eleanor (a devout Catholic) banished my mom to her room and probably threatened her with grievous bodily harm if my mom didn't hurry up and get ready. In tears, my mom threw herself onto the bed, sobbing and probably plotting how she would run away, when her mouse crawled out from under her Easter dress where it had been hiding.

I took this story for granted as a kid: I had always wanted a mouse for a pet and was so jealous that my mom had been allowed to have one. Now that I am (purportedly) a grownup and all three of the apartments Judson and I have lived in since we got married have had unpurchased mouse “pets” living in them upon our arrival, I am mostly just shocked at the idea that anyone would want a pet mouse, particularly my mom, who wasn't even really that fond of dogs until we got one when I was a kid.

I like to imagine that, while my mom was throwing a tantrum and then rejoicing over her lost and found mouse, this Easter bread was rising in the kitchen, ready to be eaten with brunch after church as soon as the Easter egg hunts were finished.

I'm not really sure what makes this “Easter” bread; Judson thinks it's because it contains eggs, while I think it's supposed to be either a Jesus allusion (the bread rose like Christ!) or else a riff on the fact that it's basically just challah, a typical Jewish egg bread. Either way, it's delicious. The recipe, which I thought would be temperamental, is surprisingly forgiving and I've mapped it out below in a much easier to follow manner than how it was bequeathed to me.

It's time consuming-- the bread rises twice, along with a weird hour-or-two long stage where it just sits in a warm place without being mixed, so it's definitely a recipe you want to make the night before you have it for brunch. It's versatile: you could leave out the raisins or swap them for currants or dried cherries, add a dash of cinnamon and cardamom or even an egg wash to shine up the crust right before you pop it in the oven. And the loaf it makes is so large, you'll definitely have enough leftovers to make french toast or bread pudding later in the week-- a prospect I'm already excited about. It's sweet enough you don't need to top it with anything but soft butter, and this morning I sprinkled a little flaky sea salt on top after I toasted a slice with butter and, well, if it's not the best breakfast I've had all week then I don't know. Judson has already mentioned slathering it in clotted cream, which also sounds amazing to me, though it really doesn't need any embellishment to shine.

This is what the "cracks" in the flour should look like at the end of the resting period.

This recipe is written in a hand I don't recognise, but Eleanor added her own notes all the way through-- along with the stains that cover the recipe card, this is how I know she must have made it a fair few times. My favourite note is at the bottom, where she reminds herself that it was “made in applecake pan (grease it).”

The Verdict:

3 spoons out of five. Delicious, but unless you're going to a party, it makes an impractically large loaf. Also, despite the richness of the bread, it's still a bit drier than I would like (hence serving it with butter)-- I wanted this to be a dense, moist bread that bordered on “sweet roll” territory, but instead it's about the same texture as challah: airy and a little bit dry for my taste. Still delicious, and if I get invited to a last minute Easter shindig, this'll be my go-to.

 

The Recipe:

Easter Bread

The Ingredients:

1 c milk
½ c sugar
6 c + 1 tbsp flour, divided
½ tsp salt
4 ½ tsp yeast (2 packets, if you're stateside)
1/3 c water, lukewarm
½ tsp vanilla
4 tbsp butter, melted
3 eggs
1 ¼ c raisins (I used sultanas)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Boil milk and sugar carefully, stirring constantly, for about 3 minutes.
Put 1 tbsp of flour into a large mixing bowl and pour boiled milk mixture over it.
Add salt, mix and smash out all lumps, and allow to cool.
When milk mixture has cooled to lukewarm, dissolve yeast in the warm water, making sure water is not too hot.
Add yeast mixture to lukewarm milk mixture and stir well.
Beat in 1 cup of flour with a whisk.
Sprinkle an additional 1 cup of flour on top of mixture, but don't stir it in. It's helpful at this stage to smooth over your flour gently so it's relatively flat-- you'll notice the cracks better when they finally appear.
Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let stand in a warm place until cracks appear in the flour (see picture). If you're in the UK, this might take up to 2 hours. If you're somewhere warmer, it could be about 30 minutes.
Once cracks have appeared in the flour, mix well with a large spoon.
Add vanilla, melted (but not too hot) butter, eggs, and raisins.
Add 2 cups of flour and mix well.
Continue adding flour gradually, until dough no longer sticks to hand and “is satiny” but not too dry (For me, this meant adding about 2 more cups of flour).
Use spoon to shape dough into a rough ball shape, cover tightly and let rise in a warm place until double, about an hour and a half.
Punch down the dough and knead it well, at least thirty times or so.
Shape according to your pan(s), place dough in pans in a warm place and let rise again, about an hour.*
Preheat oven to 350F/176C and cook for 35 minutes for a single large loaf, or about 25 minutes for two smaller ones.

*I used an ungreased cake pan for this because the dough felt too heavy to go into a loaf pan and I thought it would rise too much. I (and Eleanor, who also made it in a cake pan) definitely recommend this, but if you're intent on making it in loaf pans, make sure you only fill your loaf pans about 2/3 of the way so that the dough has plenty of room to rise. It popped right out of my nonstick cake pan, but if you're worried about sticking or just want an extra brown crust, feel free to grease your pans with a little butter.