This month’s recipe club them was “Anything with Alcohol” and Jose’s favorite dessert is bread pudding. This one was a no-brainer. However, there are about a zillion different variations on bread pudding. You can use a lot of different kinds of bread (I saw one recipe for pumpkin bread pudding that I definitely have to try at some point) and if you go the alcohol route, you can use rum, bourbon, whiskey…probably some others too.
I finally decided on this one from Simply Recipes. I ended up making it twice — the first time I made a half batch as a test for Valentine’s Day. When I made it for recipe club, it ended up soggier — but with bread pudding, soggy is generally ok, so it wasn’t a problem, just a difference. I made a couple changes, mostly pretty minor:
- I used dark rum instead of bourbon. Mainly because rum is what we had.
- After the first batch, I cut back on the sugar by 1/4 cup for both the sauce and the pudding. (So 1 3/4 for the pudding and 3/4 for the sauce.) You could cut back even farther for the sauce if you don’t like too much sweetness.
- For the sauce, I didn’t use a full cup of rum. I didn’t measure, but it was probably about 1/2 cup.
- I didn’t have allspice, so I used a combination of nutmeg and ground cloves in addition to the cinnamon.
I don’t think the type of raisins really matters, but I used golden raisins because I figured they would look nicer, and I think they did. You could also leave the raisins out entirely if you want, but I think they’re kind of a traditional ingredient so I went with it. When making the sauce, the directions are correct — you have to be REALLY careful to keep the heat low and stir constantly or it will start to curdle, especially when you add the egg (which happened to my first batch of sauce and it looked disgusting).
Overall it turned out quite tasty. Jose loved it, and it won “best dish” at recipe club — there were a couple people who said they didn’t even like bread pudding, but they liked this. And despite the recipe saying that it’s best eaten fresh, Jose and I found that it actually got even BETTER, in our opinion, when reheated a day later.
