Quadruple-chocolate bread & butter pudding

[desperance]

I can do this because I can buy chocolate-and-sour-cherry bread with extra chocolate chips in, from an artisan-baker; you may need to search for an equivalent, or a substitute. Chocolate croissants would probably be yummy; something more cakey - chocolate muffins, say - would be different, but might still work. Go forth and experiment. Or just use plain white bread, and subtract as necessary from that 'quadruple' in the title...

Anyway: slice your bread (leaving the crusts on, thank you very much) and butter every slice, then make it into sandwiches with chunks of good dark chocolate for filling. Cut the sandwiches into pretty triangles. Or near offer.

Put 200g of more good dark chocolate into a bowl with 100g butter, 600g double cream and 120g vanilla sugar (NB - all these measurements are approximate; adjusting any of them one way or the other isn't going to make much difference to the end result). Put the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, and stir occasionally until everything is melted and/or dissolved smoothly together.

Whisk three eggs and stir the chocolate mixture thoroughly into them.

Butter a broad shallow oven dish, and pour in a little of the consequent custard. Fill it with the sandwich triangles, then pour over the rest of the custard. Make sure all the bread gets coated, even if you end up with little peaks poking up from the surface (which is ideal, really).

Cover with clingfilm and leave to rest. The longer the better, basically.

Come dinner-time, remove the clingfilm and slip the dish into the top of a medium oven for half an hour or so, till the peaks are crunchy and the whole is thoroughly hot. Serve with pouring-cream. Smallish portions might be wise, to start with...

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

It never would have occured to me to buy chocolate-cherry bread. So now I've found myself a recipe to make it with, and sometime when I have people to feed dessert to, I'll make your quadruple-chocolate bread and butter pudding. :) It sounds *lovely*.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh! Share recipe? Post link? (I seldom make bread any more, 'cos it hurts my hands v much; I forget, therefore, that bread can still be made as well as bought. Foolish me...)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Well, in fact, all the chocolate-cherry recipes I found appeared to be white bread with chocolate chips and cherries, so I ended up searching for and finding this chocolate bread recipe, which is from 1935 and therefore trustworthy. (Um. Possibly other people do not think the way I do, but I tend to trust older recipes more than newer once. Particularly because if you look at, say, the 1973 version of THE JOY OF COOKING, and then at the 2003ish one, you will discover that recipes for the same food--say, cranberry muffins--have had between 1/3rd and 2/3rds as much sugar and often a significant increase in fat added to the recipes in the past thirty years. My all-purpose home cookbook is from the 40s, and it is fantastic beyond belief, so I tend to go for older recipes if I can find them. And, actually, I should check to see if *it* has a chocolate bread recipe, and if it does I'll post it, because it's sure to be brilliant.).

Right. Anyway, it looked like the right sort of recipe, and obviously one could just switch out pecans for cherries. Or put both in. :)

If making bread hurts your hands you obviously have an excuse to buy a KitchenMaid sort of thing which will knead the dough for you! I got one and because I discovered it's not any /faster/ to use the Big Mixer, I still do it by hand, but it's a great excuse. Mine's a Kenwood, not a KitchenAid, but same general idea (only half the price).

[billbrent.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, so now I am off to brew coffee and mourn my kitchen's lack of anything resembling quadruple-chocolate bread & butter pudding as accompaniment. SOB!!!

On a more serious note (well, as serious as I usually get in this forum, LOL), I have copied your recipe (oooh, metric measurements!) and hope to experiment soon.

Finally, you said "clingfilm." What a cooool word. It's so much smoother and descriptive than the American "plastic wrap." I'm going to start using "clingfilm" instead.

So thanks!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. Um, do metric measurements work over yonder, or should I transpose into pounds and ounces? (Various spies have told me that most US cooks don't weigh things anyway, they just measure volume, but I can't get my head around that...)

[billbrent.livejournal.com]

There's no need to transpose on my account. Either I can do the conversions myself, or my utensils have both metric and US formats imprinted.

Usually I take measurements as approximate, anyhow, unless it's something like baking powder that will have a critical impact on the outcome if it's not measured precisely.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

I'm just going to sulk for a little while because that sounds amazing and I want. Can't have. Want. [sulk]