Almond Rice Pudding with Homemade Caramel Sauce

Blogging Marathon#65: Week 2/ Day 2

Theme: 1 Sauce -- 2 Dishes

Dish: Almond Rice Pudding with Salted Caramel Sauce

I LOVE rice pudding but hardly ever make it because of my husband is not fond of milky desserts. When I saw this rice pudding with caramel sauce, I was initially skeptical to try because I feared it was going to be too too sweet. But it was probably the best rice pudding I ever made.

I had some almond milk that needed to be used, so I used it to make the rice pudding. You can use regular or other non-dairy milk. But the creaminess of the dish might suffer a little bit with some of the milk alternates.

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Banana Avocado Chocolate Pudding using Sunwarrior Protein Powder

I have recently started taking exercising more seriously and started doing P90X exercise routine. My aim is not sculpted abs or major weight loss but to get more flexible and have a toned body. There were some exercises that were very tough in the beginning but have now become little less tough. I still have a long way to go in terms of becoming flexible. But I'm happy that I've started doing some exercise and taking care of myself.
After starting the exercise regime, I have been thinking of adding some more protein in the diet by using protein powder. I was researching on the different protein powders available in the market and lo and behold, Sunwarrior sent me a Starter kit to try.

I was very excited to try the various products in the kit. I made this Avocado, Banana, Chocolate pudding aka ABC pudding using Sunwarrior Vanilla Classic Protein powder. What is nice about this Sunwarrior protein is that it is 100% plant based and provides a complete, balanced array of essential amino-acids. Sunwarrior uses an old-world, low temperature, enzymatic process that includes the whole grain of brown rice, including the germ, endosperm, and bran. This unique process captures a protein that's silky smooth and mixes well and tastes great too.

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Pumpkin Bread Pudding

Recipe Marathon - Day 2

So what do you do when you bake a bread and after its cooled you realize its not completely baked in the center?? Let me know what you folks do, but I decided to make a bread pudding with the 2/3rds baked bread.

This is how the whole unbaked bread pudding came about: I had to bake bread for my colleague’s b’day and decided to make pumpkin bread from King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grains Cookbook. Recipe called to bake it for one WHOLE hour. It was a weekday and I didn’t think that the bread needs to be baked for one WHOLE hour (based on what?? I don’t know!!!). So I decided to take it out around 52 minutes, please note that I checked the doneness with my cake tester and it came out clean (psst.. just so you know I did not test the center though, did the checking somewhere along the edges). After taking it out, I noticed there was a ridge on the top, didn’t think much about it and went about doing my clean up and getting the kitchen ready for the next day. After about an hour when I came back to see if it was cool enough to cut, I noticed that the ridge has now sunken and collapsed. OK—when I cut in the center, it was still a little gooey but not too bad, so cut around it and took it to work. Just for the record, nobody realized that some part of that bread was unbaked and everybody liked it.

So now I had a container of unbaked scraps which went into this yummy bread pudding this weekend. My googling for pumpkin bread pudding brought back results with regular bread and pumpkin added to the custard. But due to the circumstances I was in I had to do a role reversal and use pumpkin bread & simple custard. I cut down on the sugar used for the custard since there is enough sugar in the bread itself. I left the bread uncovered for almost half a day to dry them a little bit. I liked so much that may be next time I’ll bake the bread just to make this pudding.

Ingredients:
Pumpkin bread – 2 cups, chopped
Egg – 1
Soymilk (Cream or half-n-half or milk) – 1½ cups
Sugar – 2-3tsp

Method:

• Preheat oven to 350ºF.
  
• Whisk milk, sugar & egg in a small bowl.
  
• Grease a baking dish and add chopped bread. Pour the prepared custard and let the bread soak for 10-15 minutes. Bake for 30-40 minutes until a tester inserted in the CENTER comes out clean. Enjoy warm.

P.S.: Recipe for Pumpkin bread coming up soon.