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!

Justin's Birthday King Cake Recipe

I came home this past Monday afternoon to find three chicken feed sacks on the old double wash stand on the back porch with a King cake recipe on top of them.  I didn't know where the feed sacks came from at the time but the recipe was from Mrs. Jeanie.  She was wondering if I could make the king cake for Justin's birthday?  Well sure -- no problem.  And it wasn't.  The whole thing turned out nicely enough that folks have been clamoring for the recipe.  Wwwwwwellllll this one isn't mine.  It was copied and pasted and sent via email to Mrs. Jeanie so I don't know where it came from and lay no claim to having come up with it. I'll gladly put it out here for y'all to make at home and if you ever run across the origin of it, let me know;  I'd like to thank them in person!

To differentiate it from any other King Cake I'm going to call it Justin's Birthday King Cake.  The ingredients and instructions are written exactly as they came to me.  If I'd have know how well it was going to turn out in advance, I'd've done a tutorial...

King Cake
Ingredients

For the dough:
1/4 ounce package active dry yeast
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 3/4 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
8 tablespoons butter

For the filling:
1 pound cream cheese
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup chopped pecans
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
zest of 1/2 lemon

For the icing:
2 cups confectioner's sugar
1/4 cup buttermilk
green, purple, and yellow sanding sugars

Instructions:
Make the dough.  In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a hook, combine yeast, 1/2 teaspoon of the sugar, and 1/4 cup water heated to 115 (tepid).  Stir to combine and let sit until foamy, about ten minutes.  Add remaining sugar, milk, light brown sugar, vanilla, egg, and egg yolk.  Beat on low speed until thoroughly combined, approximately one minute.  Turn mixer off and add flour and salt.  Mix on medium speed until the dough just comes together.  Turn mixer speed to high and knead dough for four minutes.  Add the butter and continue kneading until dough is smooth and pulls away from the side of the bowl, about six minutes.  Remove bowl from mixer, cover with plastic wrap, and let sit until doubled in size, 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Meanwhile, make the filling.  Combine cream cheese, brown sugar, pecans, cinnamon, salt, and zest in a large bowl and beat on medium speed of a hand mixer until combined, set aside.

Punch down dough and turn it out onto a heavily floured surface.  Using a floured rolling pin, roll the dough into a large circle, about 1/4 inch thick.  Cut a hole in the center of the circle and pull with your fingers to widen.  Place dollops of filling evenly around circle halfway between outer edge and inner hole.  Drape outside edge over filling and continue rolling outside inward until filling is covered, widening inner hole as needed until dough covers the seam.  Transfer rolled dough circle to a parchment paper-lined baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap and let sit for one hour.  Heat oven to 350.  Uncover cake and bake until golden brown, about thirty minutes.  Let cool completely.

Make the icing:  Whisk together the sugar and buttermilk in a small bowl until smooth.  Transfer king cake to a cutting board or serving platter;  spread icing evenly over top of cake and sprinkle evenly with sanding sugars.

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A foodie mentioned on FB the other day that she found sanding sugar on sale and bought it.  I was stunned. Amazed.  People buy sanding sugar?  Seriously?  NNNNnnnaw... Put enough granulated sugar for the task in a ziploc bag and drop in a drop of color.  Massage/shake/ mix the bag until the coloring is distributed.  Voila! Sanding sugar.

The squeeze bottles didn't work well at all for getting the sugar on the cake.

That's just a little FYI so you don't think it might!

The buttermilk icing is very thick and almost wasn't enough to cover the cake.  ohhh wow!  I'd never made a drizzle with buttermilk before and was very pleasantly surprised to find it was delicious!  When you make yours, go ahead and increase the buttermilk a few drops. 

There are a few things I'd tweak about the filling recipe:

Maybe, since I live in the Deep South, I don't exactly know what the maple syrup is doing in here.  I couldn't taste it at all so next time, I'm leaving it completely out.  The Chinese cinnamon came from Penzey's spices and was absolutely the cat's meow!  I'm so grateful to my cousin that brought me four different kinds of ground cinnamon from Penzey's -- I love and can discern them all now.  Maybe the lemon zest was supposed to be barely tasted?  I think I did because I knew it was in there.  It didn't do anything.  The magic of the filling is the brown sugar, cinnamon, pecans, and cream cheese working together.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to leave it at that next time.

Annnnyways.  It's almost midnight... I'm going to set all the dry ingredients out tonight so I can put together another one after church tomorrow.  Try one in your own kitchen.  And don't forget the baby!  I forgot the baby.  Enjoy!