Mud Pie Milk Chocolate Cadillac Cafe Bread Pudding

To be honest this is not the most attractive dessert I've ever made. In fact it looks more like the best-looking mud pie I've ever made. It might have been prettier if I'd rearranged the bread after one hour in the fridge as the recipe suggested, rather than after ten hours, by which time the middle slices of bread were so bloated and relaxed they looked like they were on a beach holiday (in the mangroves). It didn't seem right to poke around in the custard at that stage. Also, by that time some of the slices hadn't soaked up the custard but it was too late to remedy that either.

I'm not sure how the large version below tasted since I gave it away. I also made a mini pudding with some leftover bread and custard and it was delicious, not to mention extremely rich. I'm not surprised it was rich since there are a total of 10 egg yolks in the custard.

Thanks to my sister-in-law, Pilar, for the great shot of the cooked pudding although she really owes me big time since she got to eat it. And to be honest, would it kill a person to put a dusting of icing sugar over it before photographing it? :)

My parents were visiting me this week so I had a sous chef to help me out and offer good advice. My Mother is an excellent baker and I'm sure it was from her that I got my love of baking.

She's remorseless, says my mother, referring to the, by all accounts, kind and gentle Rose's penchant for the complex, multiple-bowl-using and time consuming methods over the fast and easy care approach. You can see where I get my penchant for melodrama. But we both agreed it made sense to melt the chocolate in the warm cream rather than melt and mix it into the custard separately, as the recipe suggested.

You can see I made one large pudding rather than multiple small ones. Not only could I not understand the complicated instructions for dipping the bread slices in the custard (I think my eyes glazed over), I just couldn't be bothered mucking around with little pots. Plus I didn't have enough ramekins. 

Those pieces of toasty bread were slippery little suckers. Lucky Mum was pretty handy with the fork.

Ten hours later and those little toasts had formed a slightly icky-looking rose (if you screw up your eyes). I cooked it for about 20 minutes longer than the recipe specified. 

The cooked chocolate pudding flew South with my parents as a present for my brother and his family. I offered it to them after there was a sad miscalculation with baking powder and the banana cake that was intended to be the present instead turned into a very wide biscuit. What's that saying? Every time a child says they don't believe in cake, another cake fails. Or something like that. Lets blame it on the children anyway.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Bourbon Pecan Butter Balls.