Bread Pudding

I remember making bread pudding so many times but so many years ago. It was really time that I had a go at making it again. Of course , we used to make this with quite meagre ingredients back in the day , and it can still be made this way, I wanted a rather more luxurious take on this old fashioned bake and stumbled on this recipe after what seemed like hours of searching

Thanks to Traditional British regional food and recipes for this wonderful recipe.

Bread Pudding

100g butter, plus extra for greasing 

500g sultanas/mixed dried fruit ( I use whole glace cherries too )

100g whisky (optional)

600ml milk

150g soft light brown sugar

1 orange, zested

2 tsp mixed spice

2 tsp ground ginger

500g stale bread

2 eggs, beaten

50g demerara sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4. Grease and line the base of a 20cm square cake tin.

Put the sultanas/mixed fruit and whisky into a bowl, swirl around, then set aside to soak for 30 minutes. This is optional but it gives great flavor.

Put the milk into a saucepan along with the soft light brown sugar and butter, and set over a medium heat. Heat until the butter has melted, then remove from the heat, stir in the orange zest and spices, and leave for another 15 minutes for the the dried fruit

Break up the bread until it forms breadcrumbs -  don't worry too much about how fine it is as it becomes soft and breaks up in the liquid anyway -  then add to the liquid and mix well. Add

the eggs and whisk to combine. Pour into the prepared tin and press down lightly into the corners, then sprinkle with the demerara sugar. Bake for 1 hour until golden brown and just set.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack, then turn out and cut into squares to serve.

This was a fabulous recipe, I did add almost a whole pack of glace cherries as I love cherries but otherwise I mostly kept to the original recipe. Utterly delicious!