Alcoholic Old Fashioned Bread Pudding Recipe

I am a bread pudding addict. If there is breadstuff pudding on a dessert carte du jour, I volition order it without hesitation: it even trumps chocolate. Patently bread pudding was 1 of those dessert staples in The New Globe, because there is at least one recipe in every heritage cookbook. My fiancé and I consider ourselves to exist bread pudding connoisseurs – my ideal breadstuff pudding is dense, merely still fluffy, with discernable staff of life chunks, and a smattering of crunchy bread pieces on top. I similar a hint of brandy in either the sauce or the pudding itself. Not picky at all.

I studied and compared over fifteen different recipes before I settled on the recipe for the pudding and sauce below. I chose a recipe for the pudding from "American Cookery" past Amelia Simmons, the beginning American Cookbook. Upward until Mrs. Simmons published "American Cookery" American housewives used English cookbooks, which didn't include practical uses for the native flora and fauna of the New World. Mrs. Simmons book included "receipts", or recipes, for this new civilization and recorded our fledgling culture for posterity.

Almost of the recipes suggested that bread pudding be accompanied past a "Hard Sauce". It is basically icing with liquor. Yum. I made the recipe from The Joy of Cooking (First Edition).

Clarification

This is a surprisingly piece of cake dish to pull together! You volition love the rich, flossy texture of the pudding and the crunchy sweet topping! Top it with brandy difficult sauce and you take yourself a new favorite dessert!

For the Bread Pudding:

5 cups mean solar day sometime bread, cut into ½" cubes (I used this homemade raisin bread!!)
two cups whole milk
3 eggs (extra large, lightly browbeaten)
¾ cup sugar
¼ cup butter (unsalted, melted)
one/viii teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
(1 gill rosewater – I could not find this at my local farmer's market place)
½ cup cream
½ lb raisins (I used ½ cup tart cherries, which added a dainty tart balance to the sweetness of the dish)

For the Topping:

one cup bread, cut into ½" cubes
one tablespoon sugar
ane tablespoon butter, melted
¼ teaspoon cinnamon

For the Hard Sauce:

¼ loving cup butter (unsalted)
1 cup powdered carbohydrate, sifted
1 large pinch salt
1 tablespoon (or more to gustatory modality) brandy
1 egg (optional – I left this off because information technology is eaten raw)

For the Bread Pudding:

Preheat oven to 325°. Accommodate rack to the middle of the bottom one-half of oven.
Butter an 8 ten 8 baking dish. Distribute bread chunks evenly in the dish and sprinkle cherries evenly throughout the staff of life. Add Mix all ingredients after bread. Once completely incorporated, pour mixture over the bread & cherries.
Embrace dish and refrigerate for 20 minutes.
Mix ingredients for topping and sprinkle over the pinnacle of the custard, pressing down slightly.
Bake at 325° for twoscore-50 minutes or until custard is gear up. The top will chocolate-brown and it volition just jiggle slightly in the very middle.

For the Hard Sauce:

Foam the butter until it is very soft.
Add the sugar gradually, and then the salt and shell these ingredients until they have a smooth, soft consistency. I could not get my carbohydrate to the desired consistency, so I used the back of a wooden spoon to printing the butter and sugar together until they were smooth and soft. Vanquish in the brandy (and optional egg) and chill the sauce thoroughly. Or serve warm 🙂

Notes

Pudding: I halved the original recipe and converted the measurements to current standards.
Hard Sauce: I used ii tablespoons of brandy, which had a definite alcohol season. Every recipe I read said to chill "Hard Sauce" and serve information technology cold, but my fiancé and I found it unpleasant to consume chilled, so I warmed it up and drizzled it over the pudding. Much ameliorate.

Prep Time: 15
Cook Time: 45
Category: Desserts

It took every ounce of will power within me not to soak the cherries in brandy before calculation them to the pudding. If you lot are not trying to follow a heritage recipe to the letter, then I highly recommend doing this. Divine! I would so do a nice caramel sauce or a Hard Sauce made with 1 teaspoon of vanilla in place of the brandy.