IMBB#25: Give Us This Day Yesterday's Bread

I've deliberately missed Sugar High Friday last week hosted by Lick The Spoon because it called for the use of liquer. Practically the whole household was on medication, hence there is no point in making anything using liquer since non of us could savour the end result. There were lots of interesting goodies posted for this event, go have a look here at the roundup.

So, I'm not gonna miss this month's Is My Blog Burning (IMBB). This installment is hosted by Derrick of An Obsession With Food (Wine) with the theme - good uses for stale bread.

This is something I've found in an old copy of Flavours magazine (Nov 1999 to be exact). This is a recipe filed under the title Recipe Time Forgot. Apparently a Benedict Wu found among the things his mother left behind was an old recipe book which he remembered as her cooking bible which she cooked his favourite childhood food, some of them long forgotten. He had shared some of the recipes in the magazine and this Caramel Bread Pudding is one of them.

Caramel Bread Pudding

100g stale bread with crust left on (I've used stale raisin bread)
6 tablespoons condensed milk
600ml hot water
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt

Caramel:
100g sugar
1 tbsp water
1 tsp lemon juice

Prepare caramel by cooking sugar, water and lemon juice on low fire until mixture turns a pale caramel colour. Do not stir and do not burn or caramel will be bitter.

Coat steaming bowls with caramel by tilting mould in all directions until caramel no longer flows.

Break up bread into large pieces. Put in a large bowl and pour hot water over it. Allow bread to soak.

Combine egge, vanilla, salt and condensed milk. Pour this over bread and mix. Rest for a minute then pour into prepared mould. Steam covered for an hour. Serve warm or better still cold.

Since I was using raisin bread, I find that they're not that absorbent, hence I reduced my hot water to 500ml. Even by doing so, I find there is too much liquid hence I've added more bread to soak them up. I've also used 3 eggs instead since it's pretty hard to get large sized eggs in my area.

Moist and laced with caramel, this steamed bread pudding is a lot less fattening than the usual baked bread and butter pudding. You can serve it with a dollop of cream or evaporated milk.

Hubby who loves caramel pudding find this tasted almost like caramel pudding except this one has bread in it and he's not a big fan of bread! I've tried both warm and cold version but I prefered the warm one personally as it is softer and moist, but most importantly it's not very sweet. The one pictured is actually a hot one which explained why there is no caramel liquid pooled around the pudding, so let it cool down more before serving. You may just heat it up using the microwave oven before serving.

Thank you Derrick for hosting this edition.

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