I'm Back!

And in one complete piece! Phew~!

Did you miss me?

After a long month of struggling with pencils, brushes, needles and sewing machines, I'm glad to report that I've fully accomplished my mission and successfully, more or less, survived my second academic year at fashion school! YAY! If you want, you can take a look at my proudest creation up to date.

Ok! So back to the edible.

I actually baked a couple of times before my hellish term started back in March but didn't get around to posting about them. I've been pestered by SK for quite some time to make bread pudding. But I've never had bread pudding before, and thought it was just simply soggy french toast. So it didn't appeal THAT much to me and I obviously procrastinated. Then it seemed to be like bread pudding season somewhere in Fall of the Northern hemisphere, when I saw this and this. But I still didn't make it.

So after a long long wait, I finally got around to making bread pudding in March. But that's partly because I had leftover cranberries and apples and oranges to use and found it exactly the ingredients of this bread pudding which I thought looked really quite good.

Not having bread pudding before, much less making it, I looked through some trusty food blogs online for recipes to reference to. And my favourite (and only) dessert cookbook. And they seemed easy enough: thickly sliced bread in a simple custard of milk (sometimes cream), eggs and sugar make up a very basic recipe which can be flavoured and tweaked with additions of other ingredients. So, to use up the leftover ingredients that I've had in my refrigerator for *ahem* months *ahem*, I infused the custard with orange zest and orange juice and topped the puddings with diced apples and cranberries. I made individual bread puddings because I brought them for a sleepover with my fellow art-sians and was quite attracted by how Bea packaged hers. I'm not sure if I over-filled my cupcake cups because they were leaking by the time they were supposed to go into the oven and I had to stack up to 4 cups for 1 pudding. So feel free to use ceramic ramekins or baking dishes if you're not going to have them lugged around like me.

Truth be told, I can't remember the exact quantities of the ingredients I used, so I'm going to leave you with some very very vague measurements here. But I promise to recreate something soon enough to post an accurate recipe that works.

Cranberry and Apple Bread Pudding

Ingredients
1 green apple (I used Granny Smith)
~200g loaf of multi-grain bread
400ml milk
2 large eggs
~80g sugar + 1 tbsp
Zest and juice of 1 orange
Handful of cranberries
Icing sugar for dusting

- Peel, core and dice the green apple. Set in a bowl and let macerate with orange juice and 1 tbsp of sugar.
- Slice bread thickly into 3/4" slices. Cut them into 1" sticks.
- Divide bread sticks evenly into 10 individual cupcake cups, lined with wax paper, or greased ramekins/baking dishes.
- In a large bowl, whisk together milk, eggs, sugar and orange zest.
- Divide the custard mixture evenly into the cups and let the bread soak up for about 10 - 15mins. Here's where you need to keep an eye on the puddings if you're using cupcake cups. If they leak, layer on the paper cups.
- Preheat oven to 180 degC.
- Top the individual puddings with macerated apples and cranberries and bake for 45mins.
- Let cool slightly before serving and dust with icing sugar if desired.

By the time we got around to eating the puddings in the midst of our movie marathon, they were already quite cold and I don't think it did them much justice. The tops were kinda dried out which I thought would be slightly crusty and crispy if it had been warm, or not been left out for that long. I think If I were to do it again, I'd probably not have my bread stick out of the cups this much, or soak them all in custard before filling them into the cups. Also, my friends thought they weren't sweet enough and I drizzled on extra syrup for them. I don't have a major sweet tooth and didn't have a problem with the sugar content. If you like your desserts really sweet, add more more more! sugar.