Custard Bread Pudding with Bourbon Sauce

This is a basic bread pudding recipe that has a moist custardy texture that melts in your mouth. The custard mixture has a clean sweetness that could easily be fancied up by tossing in raisins, chopped green apples, blueberries or any combination of fruits or nuts.

Adjusting the amount of bread will give you extremely different results. If you take away a cup of bread your bread pudding will have a pure custard layer at the bottom. If you add a cup of bread you will end up with a firmer, dryer bread pudding. It all depends on your personal taste. I used ½ French Bread and ½ Hodgepodge Banana Bread for my bread pudding, but any sweet bread would work well.

What makes this bread pudding spectacular is the bourbon sauce, a simple mixture of butter, sugar and bourbon brought together over a double boiler creating a decadent sauce that finishes this desert perfectly. The sauce is so yummy that you will want to spoon it up and eat it straight out of the bowl, but don’t do that… This sauce also makes for a great topping over vanilla ice cream.

You could easily change out the bourbon for rum, vanilla extract or lemon juice to flavor this sauce. But for me it is always bourbon.

Both the bread pudding and bourbon sauce recipe cut in half easily and will fit into an 8 X 8 casserole.

CUSTARD BREAD PUDDING

8 cups stale bread cut into cubes, ½ French & ½ Sweet
CUSTARD
4 cups half and half
8 whole eggs
½ cup sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 ½ tsp. vanilla extract
pinch of kosher salt

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
2. Toss the bread cubes together and place them in a 9 X 13 casserole.
3. Mix the cream, eggs, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla together well and pour over bread.
4. Press the bread down with a fork to get all the bread coated in the custard.
5. Place the 9 X13 dish into a large roasting pan and fill roasting pan with boiling water to reach half way up the side of the 9 X 13 dish.
6. Bake for 55 minutes to an hour or until a knife comes out clean.
7. Serve with bourbon sauce.

BOURBON SAUCE
½ pound butter
2 Tbsp. water
1 cup sugar
pinch of salt

2 whole eggs
¼ cup bourbon

1. Place the butter, water, sugar and salt in a bowl over a double boiler. Mix with a whisk or wooden spoon until sugar dissolves and the grittiness is gone.
2. Remove from heat and beat in one egg at a time with a whisk until mixed well.
3. Add bourbon and mix to blend.
4. Return to the double boiler and cook for another 3 – 5 minutes to cook the eggs and some of the alcohol off.
5. The sauce will thicken as it cools.
6. Serve over the bread pudding.
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