What to do with stale bread.

Bread and butter pudding

When visiting my mother earlier this week she sent us home with two loaves of bread. These have sat on the side for a couple of days going stale. I hate waste so put on my thinking cap as to how to use these. My first thought was bread and butter pudding. This is loved in this house providing I don't put any fruit in. You would have thought that my boys were in heaven they loved this so much. I forget sometimes how easy it can be to make them happy.

Bread pudding

For the remainder of the loaf I fancied trying to make bread pudding. I've never done this before but it's something that I've always intended to try. I used the recipe from BBC Good Food and was pleasantly surprised by how simple it was to pull together (it's also a good way to use up lots of crusts). I was also surprised by how similar the ingredients are to Christmas pudding! I will definitely try this again but with a couple of changes. First of all it made alot. So I will probably half the recipe. The flavour was a little lacking, I think that with most of the ingredients being pretty robust it requires quite a bit of spice... or perhaps my spice mix is too old. The final thing that I would do differently would be to cover the top with foil to prevent it from going crusty as I like my bread pudding to be soft and squidgy.

All in all I am very satisfied with my first attempt.

Ingredients for bread pudding:
500g white or wholemeal bread
500g/1lb 2oz mixed dried fruit
85g mixed peel
1 ½ tbsp mixed spice
600ml milk
2 large eggs, beaten
140g light muscovado sugar
zest 1 lemon (optional)
100g butter, melted
2 tbsp demerara sugar