Bread and Butter Pudding

This recipe is quite useful in situations when you have a surplus of bread or an old, stale loaf. Rather than throwing it away you can turn it into a lovely pudding - and if you have *a lot* of it, you can easily cut into portions and freeze for cheeky wee sweet later.

I made this pudding when my other half came home with 8 loafs of bread one night (just couldn't walk past a good yellow label deal...). I used some of it for breadcrumbs, some  of it went into burgers, and some of it ended up like this:

Ingredients:

• 700-800g of white bread (fresh, frozen or stale)
• 500g mixed raisins, candied peels and dried fruit
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground cloves
• ½ tsp ground allspice
• 700 – 800 ml milk
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 150g sugar
• zest 1 orange
• 1 tsp orange extract
• 100g butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
• demerara sugar (for sprinkling – about ½ cup, depending on the pudding surface size)
• chocolate custard (for serving)

1. If you’re using fresh bread, tear or cut it up into small bits in a large mixing bowl and add the fruit, spices and milk. If you’re using stale or frozen bread, warm up the milk very slightly (just so that it’s warm) and soak the bread in it until it’s completely soft.
2. Mix the bread, milk, fruit and spices well together and completely break up the bread, until it has the texture of dough. Add the eggs, sugar and orange zest. Stir well, then set aside for 15 mins to soak.
3. In the meantime, preheat oven to 160C (fan). Line a 20cm a square cake tin with baking paper AND butter it (otherwise the pudding *will* stick to the paper).
4. Stir the melted butter into the pudding mixture.
5. Pour the pudding into the tin, sprinkle with demarara sugar and bake for 1½ hrs until firm and golden.
6. Serve with chocolate custard. (this part is vital).