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.