Chocolate Bread Pudding

ice formation on my living room window

Arctic air mass.

sunrise as viewed through my icy window

I like the words “arctic air mass.”

sunrise as seen through the ice on my living room window

Of course, I don’t actually like the arctic air mass itself, and one is moving in rather rapidly.

sunrise viewed through the ice on my living room window

Cold is one thing, frigid is something else altogether.

afternoon sunshine as seen through my icy kitchen window

afternoon sunshine through my icy kitchen window

silvery afternoon light through my icy kitchen window

That, by the way, is not a complaint.  I am not allowed to complain about the cold because I complain constantly about the heat all summer.  I figure I can want it one way or the other, but I can’t want it both.  I choose cold weather over hot weather every time.

sunrise through icy window

I haven’t started watching the second season of Downton Abbey yet.  Last spring, one day when I was feeling ill, I found the first season of Downton Abbey available for streaming on PBS.org.  I made a batch of apricot scones and a large pot of tea, and sat down to watch all four episodes in one go.  I couldn’t have stopped watching if I tried, but I had no desire to try.  I devoured the program and I felt ever so much better when it was over.  So this time, I know to wait for all the episodes to be available before I begin; I can wait a few more weeks to see the second season, but I couldn’t wait a week in between episodes.  I don’t have that much stamina.

The New York Times published a feature on the books that people are reading while they await their next Downton fix.  One of the books on the publishers’ list of recommendations is Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford.  I have been looking for a suitable used copy of the book for quite some time but haven’t found one locally yet.  The DVD of the televised version of it, however, made it to the top of my Netflix queue, so I have that to watch this weekend.  It seems wildly appropriate for the atmospheric conditions.

I just put three loaves of lovely beige whole-wheat bread in the oven.  I designed it specifically to be particularly receptive to peanut butter, composing it primarily from white whole-wheat flour, brown sugar, and milk.  And I bought a fresh jar of Teddy peanut butter too.  Tomorrow I am going to have a really good peanut-butter sandwich.

Tonight though, I’m going to watch my movie after I take the bread out of the oven.  In the meanwhile, here is a little something that will make the approaching arctic air mass a little easier to live with:  chocolate bread pudding.

Bread pudding is one of those things that is fabulous no matter what you put in it, and it is great for using up those little bits of leftover things that need to be used before they spoil.  You can put in whatever you have on hand.  Apples and raisins are traditional (and delicious), but sometimes I like to mix it up a bit and put in spinach and mushroom and cheddar cheese instead.  You really can’t go wrong if you keep your sweet and your savory a respectable distance apart (meaning don’t put cinnamon and spinach in together).

I like to use cranberry-walnut sandwich bread when I make chicken sandwiches.  I made some in the fall, intending to write a post about it, but time got away from me as it so often does, and I stuck half a loaf in the freezer so I could do it “later.”  Then I bought several bags of cranberries when they were on sale and stuck those in the freezer too, apparently on top of the bread.  I spent the next several weeks thinking that whole pile in the back of the freezer was cranberries, but to my great surprise, this week when I took out some cranberries to make cranberry sauce, I found that half loaf of bread.  It cried to be made into bread pudding.  How could I resist?

Before Christmas, I bought two bags of oranges and some pink grapefruit.  Then I was given some red navel oranges.  Then I bought some clementines.  Then this week I bought some Moro oranges and some white grapefruit.  In between, we had (literally) a bushel of apples.  Needless to say, some of those first oranges (having rested in the refrigerator all this time) are reaching the end of their allotted time on earth.  And because oranges have such an affinity for chocolate, I thought a little orange zest in the custard would be quite welcome.

And let’s face it: it’s not chocolate bread pudding without chocolate.  I have seen recipes that call for the chocolate to be melted into the milk so that the whole of the custard becomes chocolate, but I like to have chunks of melted dark chocolate in my pudding, so I leave the chunks quite large.  And since the bread had cranberries in it, I thought the pudding could only benefit from the addition of more dried cranberries (also delicious with chocolate).

In a great confluence, I also had extra milk and eggs (a rare thing to be sure).

So as not to impede the spontaneity of the pudding, it is best not to give exact measurements.  The idea is to use up stock on hand, so whatever you have is what you will make.  My half loaf of bread filled my medium sized souffle dish perfectly, so that is how much pudding I made.  Sometimes I have far more bread collected in the freezer, and I fill a much larger baking dish.  Use what you have.

As for the milk-to-egg ratio, it is quite flexible.  Generally speaking, I use one egg to one cup of milk, but if you have only 3 eggs and need 4 cups of milk to cover the bread and assorted bits in your dish, then it won’t suffer.  The same applies if you have a few leftover egg yolks.

Sugar is added to taste.  For a quart of milk with four eggs, I might put in half a cup of sugar, or maybe a little more if I am not using chocolate.  (Use no sugar at all for a savory pudding, but do use half a teaspoon of salt and some pepper and herbs to complement the greens, cheese, and other vegetables.)  The sugar can be white or brown, depending on your intentions.  Both are good, but the brown sugar will provide a more pronounced flavor.  This can be desirable depending on what else you are putting in.  This time, knowing I already had chocolate, orange, and cranberries, I used white sugar so as not to add a competing flavor.

That said, do add a little vanilla, or better still, vanilla brandy.  I put in a couple generous tablespoons of vanilla brandy, and I could have added a little more still without it being too much.  Vanilla brandy loves bread pudding as much as I do.

In preparing the bread this time, I was in a rush, so I cubed it.  That was a mistake.  I should have take the time to tear it as I usually do.  The torn edges of the bread will readily coalesce with one another, making a solid, sliceable pudding when it is cold.  When the bread is cubed with perfectly straight edges, they cubes stay as cubes, and the texture of the pudding is adversely affected. Next time I promise to take more time and cut slices and then tear them into bite-sized pieces.

Butter your baking dish well.  Toss together the torn bread, chocolate, and cranberries.  Lightly beat the eggs into the milk.  (Whole milk will make a richer, more delectable pudding, but use any milk you have, particularly if it a choice between using almost-sour milk today and pouring spoiled milk down the sink tomorrow.)  Stir in the sugar and then add the vanilla or vanilla brandy to the milk mixture.  Stir in the finely grated orange zest and grate a little fresh nutmeg into it too, if you have a nutmeg hanging around.  It ties the whole thing together.

Pour this milk mixture over the bread, making sure all the bread is covered (add a little more milk if you misjudged it; it is okay to just pour it over the top until you have as much as you need) and allow the bread to soak up the custard for a half hour or more.  It is not necessary to refrigerate the mixture during this time.  If you are preparing it a day ahead, however, it should be refrigerated, but if you are baking it in the very near future, it is fine at room temperature.

Preheat the oven to 325°F.  My mother always used to bake bread puddings in a water bath, but I had trouble finding the right sized pans to do this with, particularly when I was making a lasagna pan full of bread pudding, so I gave it up.  You can if you want to and know you have suitable pans to do it.  Otherwise, it will come out quite nicely just baked by itself on the oven rack.

The length of time you bake it will naturally depend on how large your dish is and how many eggs you put in the custard.  You want the crust to be deep golden brown and the center to be set.  If the top looks done, but the center is just a little runny still, it is usually okay to take it out of the oven and let it cool; the center will firm-up as it cools.

This is a wonderful addition to any brunch, or as a breakfast on its own, or a warming snack.  It might be a little heavy for dessert, unless you have a very light meal, such a vegetable soup.  But any way you eat it, it will bring warmth and enjoyment into your day.

Pear and Dried-cherry Crisp with English Pouring Custard

The idea for this dessert came from a copy of Bon Appetit a few years ago, although I made it for the first time last month.  I had cut out the page and put it in one of my binders, but I have hundreds (read “thousands”) of recipes I have cut out of magazines, and it’s hard to keep track of them all, even when they are in binders, and I had forgotten about it for along time.

This is the problem with recipes — there are too many of them.  I have two large boxes full of recipe cards, only a small portion of which are pictured here.

This is in addition to the five binders full of magazine clippings.  Which is in addition to the 200 cookbooks on the shelf.  It sounds obsessive, but I have been collecting recipes for over 25 years, so in my own defense, I am not as cracked as I may appear.  I used to borrow cookbooks from the library, and since I couldn’t make all the recipes I wanted to try before I had to return the books, I copied the most interesting recipes onto cards.  It passed a lot of empty hours and I learned a whole lot about cooking from the exercise, so it is not quite the symptom of a deranged mind as it first seems.  But at the end of the day, there are too many, and I can’t organize them or keep track of them in any effective way.  So while the immediate advice may be to simply recycle the bulk of them, the fact is that I cook all the time, and I actually use most of them, if not directly, then comparatively.  They are a valuable resource, if an unwieldy one.

Take for example the recipe for Walnut Speculaas.

In a cookbook, some long time ago, I found this cookie recipe and it had an accompanying photo of the cookie made in a wheat-motif mold.  Was it a butter mold or a springerle mold?  I don’t remember.  Both are suggested in the instructions.  I didn’t record the name of the cookbook, only that the cookies are “particularly nice made in a wheat-motif mold.”  The recipe is full of sweet spices and ground walnuts, and the picture looked so pretty, I copied the recipe with the note about the wheat-motif.

In the summer of 2001, Crystal and I took my kids to Sturbridge Village.

It was a great day.  We had lots of fun.  The weather was perfect.  We saw sheep shearing and spinning and weaving demonstrations, and watched the potter make jugs and the blacksmith make nails.  We ate lunch at the restaurant there and it was the first time that I ever had fresh asparagus, and I loved it.  And later in the day I found this terra cotta, wheat-motif cookie press in the gift shop.  I remembered the recipe for walnut speculaas, and thought, “oh, this will work just fine.”  It is a beautiful souvenir of a lovely day.  That was ten years ago.  I haven’t used it yet.

But today, I went to the co-op, and walnuts were way on sale, and I have been thinking about a spicy fall cookie to go with hot cider, and since walnuts had been on my list for a couple weeks, it all came together.  Of course, I spent the afternoon writing my post on mincemeat so I didn’t get to make the cookies today, but there is always tomorrow, and I already have the butter at room temperature…  I’m almost there, even if it did take me 20 years to get this far.

I have my favorite recipes on cards, some I use all the time, and others that I jot down quickly while I am working.  Some are like this one for pumpkin pie:

If you had asked me this morning if I had ever put maple syrup in my pumpkin pie, I would have said “no, but it sounds good.”  But here is evidence that I did put maple syrup in my pumpkin pie just last year.  I have no recollection of having done this, but I have a splattered record of it.  Many of my recipe cards look like this, with cross-outs and corrections all over, with no instructions, no temperatures, no times, no resultant quantities.

I tried a new pie crust recipe last week.  Or rather, due to my bad math, I inadvertently created a new pie crust recipe.  It was far and away the best pie crust I had ever made, although I was able to have only one piece of it; the kids ate the rest of the pie before I got home from work.  I wrote my miscalculated proportions down on a scrap of paper though, and I might just get around to uniting the ingredients for the pumpkin pie with the proportions for the crust on a single card, and then I will be able to recreate yet another culinary masterpiece at will.  Or I may never make either one again.  No, I am definitely making that crust again, and I am thinking I need to make the maple pumpkin pie again so I can find out if I like it.  I am sure this is a sign that I bake too much.

So I must tell you, which is my whole purpose in making this post, I have a new favorite dessert:  pear & dried-cherry crisp with English pouring custard.

I have had this on my mind for the past three years, but either pears were out of season or I didn’t have the good dried cherries (some taste waxy, not divine) or the kids ate the pears before I could make the crisp or some other misalignment of the stars prevented me from making it.  Finally, five weeks ago (I have been wanting to post this all that time) I managed to bring all the disparate elements together.

Ripe, local pears.

Delicious dried cherries.

My favorite pie plate, made by Canterbury Pottery.

I peeled the pears and sliced them into the pie plate.  I tossed in the dried cherries (these were Sunsweet dried cherries from the supermarket, as good or better than the ones I normally prefer from City Market in Burlington, but even more expensive) and the zest and juice of an orange with a little cinnamon and sugar (not too much).

Then I mixed together 1/3 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of brown sugar, and 3/4 tsp cinnamon, and then pressed 3 tbs of butter into it to make the crunchy topping.  I sprinkled it over the fruit and put it to bake at 350° until it was golden brown and bubbly.  I took it out of the oven and let it cool while I made the custard.

The custard is a must with this dessert.

When we were visiting David and Lisa, David requested apple crisp one night.  He said he had tried every dessert imaginable, and his very favorite was apple crisp.  I thought that was a simple enough request, and when I asked him if he preferred it with ice cream or whipped cream, he was appalled and said no, it must be with custard.  We thought he was out of his mind.  He said he could appreciate the how the cold ice cream would contrast with the hot crisp, but that nothing could surpass custard.  I was reluctant, but he was on the verge of becoming broken-hearted, so I acquiesced and made the custard.  He was elated, and I thought it was okay.

In the following months, I made custard several more times, and each time I liked it a little bit better.  So these few weeks ago, when I told my son that I was making pear & dried-cherry crisp, and asked if he wanted ice cream or whipped cream, he said, “no, custard.”  I agreed, and I am very, very glad I did.  I will not eat it without the custard.  It is an integral part of the dish.

This is the recipe I copied out of one of the English cookbooks (I don’t remember which one).

We don’t have an equivalent of double cream here, so I use a little Butterworks Farm cream if I have some, or a little butter if I don’t.

I started my custard making by heating the 2 cups of milk until very warm and beating the 2 eggs with the 6 tbs of sugar, then tempering the eggs like you’re supposed to, but over medium heat, it comes together so quickly that I have stopped bothering with the tempering bit.  Now I just combine the milk, eggs, and sugar in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat and whisk vigorously just until I see the first bubble come to the surface to indicate that it is at the boiling point.  Never let it actually boil or it will curdle.

Then I remove it from the heat, stir in the butter or cream, add a dash of vanilla, and pour it into a pitcher to cool.  It takes only a few minutes start to finish.  The resulting custard is quite thin at room temperature.  It pours like heavy cream, lightly coating the fruit, enhancing it but never overpowering or disguising it, giving the crisp a silky richness that nothing else can add.

By the time the crisp and custard were ready to eat, darkness had fallen and my opportunity to take a pleasing photograph of it had passed.  I said I would take a photo of the leftover portion in the morning when the sun was shining, but when the sun came up, all that was left was a little brown sugar stuck to the edge of the dish.

I’ve made it two more times since, and twice we’ve eaten it all in one sitting.  The next time I will have to make it in the morning so I can get a photo of it before we eat it all again.  In the meanwhile, make one for yourself so you can see why it doesn’t last long enough to have it’s picture taken.