Chocolate Bread Pudding

DISCLAIMER: This is not my own recipe. It is from the book Everyday Chocolate published by Parragon. (By the way, that book is actually a really good one – it has over ninety recipes, all of them chocolate-flavored, and the one I have is quite small and hardcover, plus its pages are the shiny magazine kind so they don’t get ruined as easily as normal paper.) However, the tips at the end are from my own experience.

INGREDIENTS:

• 6 slices of white bread, crusts removed (the bigger slices the better)
• 2 cups / 450 ml milk
• 3/4 cup / 175 ml canned evaporated milk (i.e. condensed milk)
• 2 tbsp cocoa powder
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• Icing sugar, for dusting (optional)
• For the fudge sauce:
• 1/4 cup / 55 g plain chocolate, broken into pieces
• 1 tbsp cocoa powder
• 2 tbsp golden syrup
• 55 grams / 1/4 cup butter or margarine
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1/2 cup / 150 ml milk
• 1 tbsp cornflour

Directions:

1. Grease a shallow ovenproof dish. Cut the bread into squares and layer them evenly in the dish.
2. Put the milk, evaporated milk and cocoa powder in a saucepan. Heat gently, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is lukewarm. (Make sure it is fully blended).
3. In a bowl, whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla essence together. Add the warm milk mixture from step 2 and beat well.
4. Pour into the prepared dish, making sure the bread is completely covered. Cover the dish with clingfilm and chill in the fridge for 1-2 hours.
5. Take out of the fridge and let stand at room temperature for a little while. Remove the clingfilm, then bake for 30-40 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius/350 degrees Fahrenheit.
6. While the pudding is baking, make the fudge sauce. Put everything in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring constantly until smooth.
7. Dust the chocolate bread pudding with icing sugar if desired and serve hot with the fudge sauce.

Tips:

• If you have brown bread, that will work instead of white too.
• If you use sweetened condensed milk, which is different from unsweetened condensed milk (well obviously – the former has added sugar), then omit all the other brown sugar, otherwise the pudding will get way too sweet.
• I doubt I have ever used golden syrup. I use maple syrup, vanilla essence, and vanilla extract interchangeably, and I always used maple syrup instead of golden in this recipe. However, today I did not have maple or golden syrup so I used honey instead, and my mom actually told be that the pudding tasted better!
• Also, today I didn’t have butter either – so I used oil in the sauce instead. (Coincidentally there were also no matches in the kitchen.) It turned out completely fine.

Happy baking (and eating this delicious treat)!