Not-Really-a-Bread-Pudding Recipe with Caramel/Sour Cream/Godiva White Chocolate Liqueur Sauce

It's all that was left!

Any given weekend there are almost always several gallon ziplock bags full of cake trimmings, i.e., the crowns sliced from cakes so they'll lay nice and flat when put together.  I do a couple of things with them:  layer them into a tub o'trimmings with the week's cake fillings, feed the deer out at Mama's (deer have a notorious sweet tooth also), or save them for bread pudding.  Yep.  Bread pudding made from cake trimmings!  That's what I did with this week's trimmings.  It was a pretty equal amount of chocolate cake and butter cake trimmings.  The amount of each one doesn't matter, though.  What matters is a very flavorful pudding, the likes of which has everyone asking for the recipe.  There really isn't one, you know, but since I've been asked for it, I'll do my best to recreate it.  

Pudding Ingredients:
8 to 10 cups of cake trimmings OR bread OR biscuits (I love bread pudding made with biscuits!)

4 eggs

1 cup milk

1 tablespoon vanilla
1 cup of sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter or margarine, melted

Crumble cake trimmings or bread into a large bowl.  Combine all other ingredients well and pour over crumbled cake, stirring everything together until cake or bread is thoroughly saturated.  Bake in large buttered casserole at 350 for as long as it takes for the center to be set, a little over an hour in my oven (but ovens vary so yours might not take as long to bake).

It was full Sunday morning!

Since I was making this for the Family Dinner Leakesville Presbyterian Church has the first Sunday of each month, I didn't particularly want to make a bourbon or a rum hard sauce.  Bread pudding just isn't bread pudding without a hard sauce though.  I had Kahlua (but it's quickly coming upon Kahlua and coffee season in the Deep South and I wanted to save it for decaf evenings on the front porch) and Godiva White Chocolate Liqueur.  MMMmmmm... Godiva...  I also didn't want to open a bag of confectioner's sugar to use and didn't want to go to the Pig to purchase a bag just for the hard sauce.  After all, my hair was already up in the hot rollers.  I got to thinking how nice a caramel flavor would be with the white chocolate.  Brown sugar would work.  I wanted something to make it creamy, too.  Sour cream was in the fridge.  I came up with this really quick recipe to satisfy all those prerequisites for a hard sauce suitable for Family Dinner.

Caramel/Sour Cream/Godiva White Chocolate Liqueur Hard Sauce 
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup Godiva White Chocolate Liqueur or whatever is in the cabinet or not at all if you want a sauce without the 'hard'

Quickly cook brown sugar and butter in a skillet until it's the sugar is melted into the butter and it's all sizzly and buttery.  Take off heat and whisk in sour cream until smooth.  Whisk in vanilla and liqueur and serve with bread pudding.  I like to pour it all on top of the bread pudding.  My neighbor likes it spooned over individual servings.  It doesn't matter how its served - just make sure you serve it with the pudding.

Everybody loved the not-really-a-bread pudding and hard sauce.  This was all that was left to bring home: just enough to take a photo of.

Y'all give it a try sometime.  It's easy and tasty and I hope y'all love it!

Bavarian Cream a la Mayree

It's creamy and rich and light and incredibly flavorful all at the same time.  And it doesn't involve folding sweetened whipped cream into a cooked and cooled vanilla custard.  It's my version of Bavarian cream and, for the first time ever, it's getting shared with everybody.

The cream made today was  Kahlua-caramel.  The proportions are all the same as the vanilla Bavarian cream, though, so it's a good one to show y'all how to put together.

Here's what you'll need:
One can sweetened condensed milk
   or dulce de leche or cream of coconut or chocolate syrup
Two small boxes instant pudding (the flavor is up to you)
Two cups of milk
8 ounces cream cheese or one cup peanut butter OR Nutella, at room temperature
16 ounces whipped topping

 For an exceptional flavor, substitute one half cup of Kahlua, 

Bailey's Irish Cream, Godiva White Chocolate, Frangelica

or any liquer for one half cup of milk.

Cream sweetened condensed milk and cream cheese until smooth.

 Today I've used a can of dulce de leche for the sweetened condensed milk.

Any sweet thick syrup-y can of something is wonderful!

Mix the puddings with the milk.

 Cheesecake, French vanilla, coconut, and chocolate fudge

puddings are the ones used most often.  Let your imagination

run wild with flavor combinations while standing in

front of the pudding section.

Add the pudding to the cream cheese stuff;

mixing until well incorporated.

Fold in non-dairy whipped topping.

 Cool Whip brand just happened to be on sale at The Pig this week.

I normally buy the WalMart brand.

Tadadaaaaa!  Cover and store in the refrigerator until ready for use.

You can put this straight into a graham cracker pie crust.  

I've also piped it into mini-pie shells!

This is a nice thick Bavarian-cream-ish filling (close enough for hand grenades and horse shoes) absolutely economically feasible for my neck of the woods.  I do love the cooked custard whipped Bavarian cream, but have precious few clients that can afford it on a regular basis.  This is economically friendly.  AND, it freezes exceptionally well.  Let it thaw in the refrigerator and no one will ever know...

It's also the thing that separates my Dirt Cake from all the others!

And there you have it.  It's the most popular cake filling here at the cakery, wonderfully light and rich and infinitely variable.

I feel so good!  The secret (not really so secret now, is it?)  is out!

Y'all enjoy!

RaCK-It-Up-To-Goodness Filling (Raspberry, Chocolate, and Kahluah, that is...)

I know.  It's a cheesy name for a cake filling:  RaCK-it-up-to-Goodness??  I can't help it, though.  I've watched Waitress again so everything coming out of the kitchen is going to have a kitschy name until the novelty wears off or y'all tell me to stop - whichever comes first.

Why did I come up with another filling?  I've a lifelong friend who's baby is graduating high school.  He'd called last week wanting one of the chocolate overloads, or whatever might be good.  He's trusting in what he's had from this cakery before for something appropriate, meaning good enough to amaze half of Hattiesburg.   And then there's a local youngster graduating high school Friday, dear to my heart...one of the fellows in and out of here often enough he has a house key.  I know both of these young men love chocolate and the chocolate overload.

But I wanted something a littttttle more for them.

I thought and thought, "Okay, Mayree.  Chocolate cake.  How 'bout the J-Rob Special (thin chocolate layers of cake with melted raspberry jam on each layer, each layer covered with dark chocolate ganache, stacked, and covered with ganache again)?  No.  Need to save that specialness.  Uhmmmmm...Hmmm.... OH!  Raspberry cream filling?  It's a start but not quite right.  Raspberry chocolate cream filling?  Sounding better.  Raspberry, chocolate, and Kahlua??  Yes!"  See how I think in incomplete sentences?

So.  Without further ado, I present RaCK It Up To Goodness creamy cake filling (which will also make one fine pie filling).

Ingredients:
2 - Jello Chocolate Fudge instant puddings
2 - 8 ounce cream cheese
1 cup chocolate syrup
1 1/2 cup raspberry jam
1 cup milk
1/2 cup Kahlua
1/2 cup coffee
2 - 16 ounce tubs of whipped topping

This makes a very large bowl of filling but remember I've two large cakes to fill.  It can be easily cut in half.  This is one of the few places where the brand matters:  Polaner All Fruit is worth the extra money for intense flavor uncomplicated by pectin.

I didn't have milk but did have evaporated milk.  Y'all know to thin it with equal amounts of water, right?  I used one half cup evaporated milk and one half cup water.  Lots of folks don't like the taste of evaporated milk.  I grew up on it and don't have a problem substituting it for regular milk.

I nuked the raspberry jam to make it less lumpy and more readily mixable.

In a large bowl mix the cream cheese, chocolate syrup, and raspberry jam.

This is lots easier if the cream cheese is room temperature.  It smells absolutely wonderful at this point.

I didn't bother washing the measuring cups;  it's all going in the same filling.  Conserve water, it's not nearly as renewable a natural resource as folks say it is.  Now mix the cup of milk, Kahlua, coffee, and two packs of instant pudding.

 

Mix the pudding mixture into the cream cheese stuff

until everything is well incorporated.

And lastly, fold in the two tubs of whipped topping

until everything has been thoroughly blended.

Give it a taste.  You know you want to.

"Mayree?"  you ask, "Wouldn't this be better with real whipped cream?"  You betcha.  Profit margin notwithstanding, though, most folks in these parts won't know the difference -- and couldn't afford it if they did.

Like I said, this is one huge bowl of incredible filling.  Kind of like Jenna's chocolate strawberry oasis pie from the movie Waitress, the flavors are complex, presenting themselves one by one.  The immediate taste is chocolate, followed quickly by coffee with a punch (that'd be the Kahlua), rounding out with a definite raspberry finish.  It's a very rich and very light filling, all at the same time.  

I'm tickled with it.  Y'all find some occasion to try it out.  I don't think you'll be disappointed.