Bread and butter pudding- using up dried bread & baked leftovers

Do you ever end up with dried bread or brioche? Bread and butter pudding is a perfect way to make a delicious meal out of something otherwise destined for the bin! I discovered the beauty of the recipe one Christmas, when I over did the baking and shopping a little bit: I made the most delicious panettone and breads. However, with all the other goodies we had half the large loaf of panettone, some Christmas stolen (marzipan filled loaf similar to panettone) and some bread all going a bit dry.

I must’ve been hungry when I went shopping before Chrtistmas, because I’d bought too much cream too.

I didn’t fancy throwing any of it out after the hard work invested in getting and making it in the first place.

My solution: bread and butter pudding.  An English classic that should be adopted everywhere.

Being slightly disorganised my dishes for the oven were all soaking in the dishwasher in an attempt to loosen all the burnt remnants of Christmas baking and roasting.  The slow cooker was, however, clean and ready for use.

I found a recipe for Bread and Butter pudding on allrecipes.com 

but adapted it a bit to use up my own ingredients:

Left-over Bread and butter pudding ingredients

Left-over bread, panettone and stolen equal to about amount of a normal loaf of bread

6 eggs

2 cups of milk

1 cup of thick double cream

You could substitute with milk, single cream, regular double cream, clotted cream, brandy sauce… or what you have leftover in the fridge along these lines.

1 tsp vanilla essence.

butter

(2 tbsp sugar)*

*depends on the base material, your bread, whether that is sweet enough.  A brioche might not need it.

a good handful of mixed dried fruits- raisins, sultanas, currents and cranberries

Remember: When making this the whole point was to make something simple, if there’s a bit more fluid or less butter you won’t really go that far wrong. It’s also a perfect dish to make with young children. They can learn skills of mixing and buttering.

Instructions for bread and butter pudding from left-overs.

1.  Switch your slow cooker/crockpot on and set it to high.
2. Butter both sides of the slices of bread, panettone, stolen, whatever type of bread, brioche or such you may have left over.
3. Lay them into the slow cooker.  Mine’s pretty big, so I spread it out a fair bit, with some over lapping.  I aimed to cover the bottom.
4. Fill the gaps:  I crumbled some of the stolen, which was already rather crumbly and annoying to butter, stuffing that gaps with that.
5. Scatter raisins or whatever dried fruit you have over the top and use to fill some gaps too.  Lots of kids will be happy to get these pockets of raisins! Mine were!
   TIP:
   Do you have any chocolate left over? You could chop that and scatter it over the top too.
   I could imagine adding pouched pears too.  What do you think?  Any fruit that wouldn’t curdle the milk.
   Or do you have some nut- peanuts, walnuts?  Chop those up and scatter them over and between the slices.
   
6. Next to prepare the liquid you pour over: crack eggs into a bowl, add milk, vanilla and cream (if you don’t have cream, just leave it out and replace with an extra cup of milk).**
   Mix well.
   
   TIP:
   Again, do you want a chocolate flavour? Add chocolate powder or some hot choc powder to the milk.
   The original recipe also added nutmeg.  That’s not for me, but you might like it.
   Or you could try cinnamon or allspice?

   ** Depending on your quantity of bread base, you may want to mix half of the liquid first, pour it over your bread and then mix the rest, if you still need it.

7. Pour the liquid over your breads.
   It should wet every slice and more or less cover it all.
8. Now go away and enjoy yourself for about 2.5 hours- if you leave the slow cooker on high setting- or 6-8 hours- if you leave your crockpot on low setting.
   Ours was done on a high setting for 2.5 hours.
9. Once done, grab a bowl, scoop some in and pour some single cream, double cream, left-over brandy sauce over it.  Or maybe even whipped cream.
   I had mine with brandy sauce. 😉
10. ENJOY!

What have you been making with your left-overs?