Jump to Recipe

I apologize to my readers (I think there are like 3 of you now…yay!) for the delay in posting.

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In addition to my receptionist gig at my small arts college, I’m also a lighting designer. For those who don’t know what that means: If you go see a play or musical, I’m the person who lights the stage and makes everyone look prettier.

And now we come to the shameless plug portion of the blog! This is the show I’ve been working on:

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Tickets available at https://www.littlefishtheatre.org 😉

It’s a very very very Irish show. We ran around all week telling each other to “Feck Off” and giving each other a lot of “shite.”

Yeah, we’re those nerds. If you have a problem with it, I cordially invite you to feck off ye fecking feck.

But because we were all running around talking in Irish accents, I got to thinking about an appropriately Irish dessert to make for this post. And look at what I have here!

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This cookbook has been hiding in my Kindle for a while now, but I rarely have time to use it. But I’d been thinking about this particular recipe for a while.

What is bread and butter pudding you ask? It basically bread puddings country cousin; crunchy toast pieces, butter, and little clean up.

The recipe says it fills a 1 quart baking dish. That is a pack of lies if I’ve ever heard one. I was ready to double my recipe because all I had was a 2 quart and it fit just fine with only one extra piece of bread.

The recipe calls for firm white sandwich bread. I don’t know if it’s because I’m dumb or if Americans just don’t do firm white bread, but I went with brioche.

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If you haven’t had it yet, Artesano bread is amaaaaaaazing.

Now, unlike most bread puddings, you don’t have to wait for the bread to go stale on you before slicing it up and dousing it with custard. Instead you spread that bread with super soft butter all the way to the outer edges. Then you just cut it diagonally and layer it in the dish.

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This is where I deviated from the recipe. Originally, the custard was just vanilla flavored and you would sprinkle some raisins on top before baking, but that sounded boring.

When I was younger, my Grammy taught us to eat cinnamon toast. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. It’s delicious and super comforting and that is what I wanted this bread pudding to taste like.

I did that by nixing the raisins and adding cinnamon (obviously) to the custard mix. The custard is a one bowl marvel: Dump the ingredients, whisk until smooth and frothy, then pour over the bread and let sit for 10 minutes before baking.

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For a little extra crunch factor, I sprinkled the top of the bread with sugar right before going in the oven. The end result was just what I hoped for.

Because the tops of the bread were not submerged in custard you got the comforting taste and texture of toast combined with the creamier bread pudding mixture. Top it with whipped cream and enjoy ya feck!

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Adapted from Real Irish Food by David Bowers