I hate to waste. I blame/credit my mother. I do not have any memory of ever throwing out food at my childhood home. Every now and then some milk would go sour, and even then, rather than just dumping the sour milk, we would find a recipe for it, usually a sour milk chocolate cake. I have no idea if it is actually better to use all the ingredients for a cake just to avoid throwing away some sour milk, but that urge seems to be in my DNA.
One of the “cookies” that I almost always make at the holidays is a fruitcake cookie from an old Bon Appetit magazine (recipe still available online at https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/old-fashioned-fruitcake-cookies). This year I “cheated” and instead of making my own candied orange peel, and instead of making the mix in the recipe, I used a combination of King Arthur’s fruitcake fruit blend and their candied orange peel. I didn’t use all of either bag, and the expiration date on the fruitcake fruit blend is well before I’ll be making the cookies again next year, so I was trying to figure out what to do with it. I also had way too much milk as we completely misjudged how much milk would be consumed at our Cookiepocalypse party, and we hate to run out. So, I made a fruitcake bread pudding.
For general amounts, I started with the Down-Home Bread Pudding recipe in the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion cookbook, with a number of variations. One of those variations was to soak the dried fruit overnight before making the bread pudding. The fruitcake cookies require soaking the fruit in alcohol, but I was thinking of this bread pudding as a potential breakfast dish, so instead I took an idea from traditional Welsh bara brith and soaked the fruit in strong tea.
The final mixture looks something like this after soaking for 1/2 hour.
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Fruitcake Bread Pudding
2 cups dried fruit (I used 1-1/2 cups fruitcake blend and 1/2 cup candied orange peel)
1/2 cup strong black tea – cooled
1 quart whole milk
1/2 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup light brown sugar
8-9 cups cubed stale bread – I used baguette, I would not use anything sweet
4 large eggs
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
Directions
- Soak fruit in tea in covered bowl overnight.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees (see step 4 – wait to preheat if you are going to let the bread sit for 1/2 hour). Put baking tray on bottom rack – my puddings always seem to run over, so better to be safe.
- Place the bread cubes, brown sugar, and fruit in a large bowl.
- In medium pan, heat the milk and butter together until butter is just melted. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, salt, spices, and vanilla extract. Slowly mix the warm milk and butter into the egg mixture. Do not add the hot liquid too quickly as you might cook the eggs before the liquids are evenly mixed. Pour the liquid mixture over the bread, sugar and fruit mixture. Stir to distribute evenly. Ideally, let sit for about 30 minutes so that some of the liquid is absorbed, stir again for even distribution.
- Butter a 2 quart casserole dish (or a 9×9 square pan, I prefer the look of the casserole dish. Pour the mixture into the butter pan.
- Bake for 50-60 minutes if baking in the casserole dish (a bit less in the 9×9 pan) until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
- This is best served warm. As described above, it’s no sweeter than baked French toast, and it worked out quite nicely for breakfast. It could easily be modified to dessert, including using alcohol (perhaps whisky or orange liqueur) as the soaking liquid.
