New Orleans Bread Pudding (Page 830)

Final Product with Bourbon Sauce Lurking in the Background

Bread Pudding has a reputation of being an over-the-top dessert synonymous with New Orleans excess. It's the kind of dessert you find on the menu of steak houses and other big calorie restaurants. But at the same time it is ultimate comfort food.  A perfect choice for quarantine.

As the name suggests, bread is the key ingredient. If you don't have good bread the final product is going to suffer, and unfortunately that's what happened here.  I bought white French bread from Food Lion for the express purpose of making bread pudding. Letting it get a bit stale is the idea, but you should not let it get hard as a rock.  (oops)

Very Dry Bread -- A Mistake

The batter is very easy to make

This is perhaps one of the easiest dessert recipes in the entire book.  Cut up the bread, mix together some butter, milk, vanilla if you like, eggs and maybe some raisins.  It's like baked french toast, but no frying involved.  It's best warm, so you can take it right out and eat it. 

The Joy recipe calls for bourbon sauce for dibbling over the top, but not strictly needed.  I made the bourbon sauce which is very easy, provided you have bourbon and butter. The sauce was really good, in fact the best part.

Bourbon Sauce, Delicious

My final product suffered from overly dry bread, which made it kind of tough and hard.  After it sat for a few days in the refrigerator it was better when heated in the microwave.  A week worth of dessert, with very little work.  

Mike:  3 stars due to chef error

Julie: Meh

Ed: Prefers Marie Calendar's pie

Chocolate Pound Cake (Pg. 727)

This pound cake certainly calls for a pound of ingredients. Sean had bought extra eggs this week intending to make pickled eggs. No offense to him but I was skeptical that project would come to fruition so I was looking for some recipes that used lots of eggs. This pound cake in particular calls for 8 eggs! ...as well as three sticks of butter and a cup of sour cream. I had to improvise on chocolate because I didn't have the two types of cocoa powder it called for or a full 8oz of bakers.

You know things are getting real when the recipe starts by mixing a chocolate butter to grease your cake pan with. Not sure how necessary that was but I did it.  

The process is not complicated at all. Mostly mixing everything together gradually with a hand mixer.

The batter was starting to look like mousse and there was a lot of it. Luckily it fit in my pan and luckily this isn't a cake that rises much. I put a sheet pan on the lower rack just in case. 

This cake was better the next day. It tasted almost under baked last night, but firmed up nicely by the morning. 

Sean: has decided to rebel against the start rating system

Beth: 5 stars, needs coffee or whipped cream