Husband bought some Challah bread this week for some
French toast he’s been jonesing after. I love challah French toast. The thick
slices and golden eggy crust are everything French toast should be. But an
entire loaf of French toast is a lot for two people, even on a snow day. Even
when we cut up all the apples in the house and make a delicious fruit compote
topping to convince ourselves this meal was good for us.
So we decided to use the other half of the Challah and make
some bread pudding.
As an avid fan of the show Chopped, I’ve been intrigued by
bread pudding for some time. It’s everyone’s go-to dessert dish and the judges
never seem sick of it – which is strange to me, because as far as I can tell,
it’s bread and eggs and milk, baked. Really?? I needed to experience this for
myself. I read a few recipes on Pinterest, but I wanted to do this Chopped
style, by which I mean wing it. Also, after using basically a one-egg-per-slice
ratio in my French toast batter, I only had two eggs and some left over French
toast batter at my disposal.
In true Chopped fashion, I decided to also
incorporate into my bread pudding some left over shredded coconut I found in
the fridge that had been in there since… well I don’t know when. Does coconut
go bad? I hope not. Mine passed the sniff test and in it went. To further liven
the developing coconut theme of my bread pudding, I decided to use a can
of Trader Joes “light” coconut
milk instead of milk in my batter. I also added a few spoons of sugar, unsure
of how sweet the coconut milk was and whipped up my custard batter as best as I
could with a fork. I then spread my chopped up Challah into a cake pan and
dumped in the egg and coconut mixture.
Just to give it a little extra something
special, and because I had it in my pantry, I also decided to add a bag of
white chocolate chips. Stirred it up, let it get all nice and mushy, and placed
it into the oven, which had been preheated at 350.
Part way through the baking, the bread pudding had risen enough that it was dripping over and burning on the bottom of the oven. Place your cake pan on a cookie sheet to prevent this from happening to you. After about 40 minuets in
the oven the pudding looked wet, but cooked (that’s the best way I can describe
it. Like, if it were a cake, it would look underdone). Upon taking the pudding
out and inspecting it more closely, the wet parts looked sticky and wonderful.
I decided to call it done. I let it cool long enough to write this post
and…………..
