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!

Ann's Hot Buttered Rum

Guess who's favorite flavor of Lifesaver is buttered rum?  I'll give you three guesses;  first two don't count.  Me?  Did you guess me?  You're RIGHT!  Needless to say, it was a pleasant surprise, becoming an adult (or at least grown) and discovering there really is such a thing as buttered rum.  X's mother made it.  I drank it, discovering pleasurable aspects to being an adult not afforded the child eating Lifesavers of the same flavor.

It's the middle of winter with the Deep South's coldest weather on its way.  I'm not sure when, only that the end of January and February are cold.  You wouldn't know it from all the shorts and yard work in evidence today.  Beaudeux and I had the house wide open while we worked outside and drank sweet tea on the porch. 

Beau doesn't actually like or drink tea.  He'd much rather

have a dark beer on a hot day but it's a dry county and we've not been

in touch with our helicopter pilot to arrange for his beer drop yet.

Labradoodles are notorious sots.

I've been trying to get the buttered rum mix made since before Christmas.  I had everything the week before and a couple of Extra Fellows with Youngest Fellow came in needing bananas foster at midnight.  It took me a while to remember more ice cream at the Pig.  I remembered  last week and, with the surge of false wellness that accompanies a shot of glucocorticosteroid,  accomplished lots of yard work, lots of inside work, managed to make hot buttered rum, and even remembered to take pictures.  

You'll need:

One pound of butter

One pound of light brown sugar 

One pound of confectioner's sugar

Two teaspoons cinnamon

Two teaspoons nutmeg

One quart vanilla ice cream, softened.

Look at the pretty OLD jars I've been riding around all week.

I <3 these!  They're the ones rescued from the old barn

the almost-kinsman had.

Those are Knox, Crown, French's mustard, Kerr, and Atlas

jars.  The Knox, Crown, and mustard jar will not be canned in.

There were seven dozen quart jars and two dozen pint jars.

I'm proud to have them.  Jars are costly!

Combine butter, sugars, and spices until creamy.

Go ahead.  Taste it.  I did.  And I'm not sorry.

Stir in softened ice cream.

If you don't feel like waiting around for the ice cream to soften up,

by all means, cut it out.  Patience is a virtue wasted on  

buttered rum.  Be careful with the knife.  

Use three tablespoons of mix with jigger of rum and boiling water to fill cup.

That's a three pound storage container full.  Is it enough for a winter?

I dunno...  Certainly enough to share (but you've got to bring your own rum).

Time to sit down and figure out what's wrong with the computer while running 

a second quality control on the buttered rum recipe.  The first QC test ran cold...

This is good without the rum, too!  It's good with scotch, kahlua, frangelica, bourbon, but not gin (trust me).  Be mindful imbibers;  this will sneak up on you quickly.  It is good for what ails ya' but too much of it will BE what ails ya...

Y'all enjoy!