Recipe: croissant bread pudding

With tart red currants and creamy milk chocolate

The humble bread and butter pudding–a dish that for me is so strongly associated with classic British puddings. It is somewhat of a divisive dish, I think, with the textures being almost non-existent for some of the not-so-great renditions, the flavours bland and visually often looking a bit anaemic. It is no surprise that for years a bread and butter pudding was low on the list of desserts I was interested in trying.

A few years ago on a crisp Saturday morning in autumn, I visited two eight seven bakery in Glasgow–it was my first time visiting. The selection on offer was lush, but almost instantly my eyes were drawn to a dense little golden cube in the far side of the glass cake cabinet. ‘croissant bread pudding’, I was intrigued. This didn’t look anything like the pale, sad bread and butter pudding that I had come to know. This pudding was deeply golden, rippled with cinnamon and chunks of pear, with a top of gloriously crunchy-looking croissant loaf and demerara sugar. I bought a slice and was smitten upon my first bite. My mind was changed–bread and butter pudding could be absolutely delicious and packed with flavour and texture.

A couple of years ago, I recreated the bread pudding–with white sourdough in place of the croissant load–featuring poached pears and studded with plump sultanas that had been steeping in chamomile, lavender and lime flower tea. For this recipe that I’m sharing, I used croissants as an ode to that wonderful bread pudding from two eight seven. The croissants are torn and baked until a rich, deep brown and layered with sprinklings of fresh, juicy red currants and chunks of milk chocolate which melt into the most glorious creamy puddles. A mixture of milk, cream and eggs spiced with cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla and nutmeg, along with the zest of an orange and some brown sugar engulfs the layers of croissants, fruit and chocolate and is baked until golden. The top layer is beautifully crunchy and buttery, with the core unctuous with chocolate and soft, chewy bites of croissant dough enriched with the milk mixture. I like it best when it has sat in the fridge overnight and allowed to set, when I can slice it like a cake and when the inner layers have a little more bite and chew. It is however absolutely delicious when eaten hot too, straight from the oven, when the layers are less stable and fall into your bowl in a delectable mess, and the chocolate is still melted.

The smell, the taste–I feel this is the perfect afternoon sweet, or dessert after supper, now that autumn is here and winter is on the way. If you don’t have red currants, you could use another fruit such as raspberries (frozen are great) or a couple of juicy ripe pears. Or, you could forego the fruit altogether, and use double the amount of chocolate for a wonderfully decadent pudding.