A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Bread and butter pudding. Tonight I didn't have dinner because I ate lunch at 4pm. Instead I decided to go straight to dessert and make bread and butter pudding out of raisin toast crusts. It also used up an apple that was not really nice for eating raw any more.

I used this recipe as a guide, but I have to say it is made of bullshit and I diverged from it in quite a few ways. Of course I am not in the business of being a Food Blogger, but as you know I am a shit cook and so it is a triumph of epic proportions that I diverged from a recipe and the result was good. So I am gifting my triumph to you.



Ingredients
4 raisin toast crusts
4 regular bread crusts
enough butter to butter the crusts
1 apple
mixed dried fruit
2 tablespoons custard powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1 and a bit cups milk
cream
cinnamon
brown sugar

As you can see, this recipe does not call for eggs because I used custard powder to create the custard part of the dish. So I guess it could be made vegan if you substitute Nuttelex for the butter, soy for the milk and whatever whipped nightmare vegans like to eat for the cream.

Put your oven on 180°C. Peel, core and quarter the apple and cut into 1cm slices. Stew these in sweetened water until they look like pie apple. While the apple is cooking, butter your bread crusts and cut each slice into quarters. Don't make the same mistake I did and cut the bread before realising you forgot to butter it, and then laboriously butter each bite-sized piece.

Mix the custard powder and sugar in a measuring jug then add 1 cup milk. Dissolve solids in milk, making sure to get rid of any lumps. Add a slug of cream if you feel like it.

Grease a loaf tin. The original recipe says to line the tin; do not do that unless you'd like to pick bits of soggy paper from your pudding.

Layer crust pieces in the bottom of the tin, alternating between raisin and regular bread. By this stage your apple should be cooked. Spoon half the apple pieces on top of the bread, adding some of the cooking syrup too. Sprinkle cinnamon generously on top; I think I was too sparing.

Sprinkle a generous amount of dried fruit mix on top. I used a mix containing sultanas, raisins, currants and orange and lemon peel, but you could use any dried fruit really – chopped-up dates or apricots might be nice.

Then layer again with more bread, apples, dried fruit and cinnamon, and finish off with a layer of bread. Douse this construction with your custard mix, splash over a little more milk for luck, and sprinkle brown sugar over the surface. You should err on the side of making it more liquidy rather than less as the bread really soaks up the liquid.

Put it in the oven until the top looks kind of brown.



Serve with cream. It doesn't look especially glamorous but really, bread and butter pudding is not meant to look spectacular – as the saying says, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And it proved to be awesome!

This tin would serve four delicate eaters or three piggies. It's pretty rich, though, and it's just made with milk. D'you know, some of the recipes I looked up called for 300ml thin cream plus 300ml thick cream! Madness.

Also, in the supermarket earlier I overheard some chicky-babe telling her boyfriend that a tablespoon of Nutella is 1000 calories, and that four spoons constitutes an entire day's worth of energy. I used to eat that stuff right out of the jar when I was a teenager.