Hello Sunshine - Lemon Bread Pudding

As you can imagine, I've been working diligently making use of all the lemons I harvested off our Meyer lemon tree earlier in the week. I mean just what does one do with 75 orbs of sunshine? Not to bore you with my bragging, I've made salt preserved lemons, lemon curd, lemon marmalade, pie filling for Shaker lemon pies and I've even frozen several cut into wedges to drop into iced tea whenever the mood takes us. Since the big guy's off and running again and I could get away with it, I made a lovely Lemon Bread Pudding last night for dinner - and my kind of dinner it was too!

Bread puddings are amazing and invented no doubt by a housewife with stale bread on her hands. I can remember my mother whipping one up for dessert teeming with raisins and smelling of vanilla. Personally, I've always loved them though there are many that would argue there's better ways of making use of that extra loaf.

Bread puddings can be savory or sweet depending on what direction the wind's blowing. I mean you can whip one up for brunch using sausage and cheese kind of like the casserole I made a while ago, or you can add sugar and flavor it with almost anything and you've got a stand out dessert. The common denominator is bread of course, along with milk and eggs and after that just let your imagination take over.

I made this old fashioned lemon version out of a bag of challah crusts and scraps I was saving in the freezer, but quite honestly I know it would have been much creamier had I used only the white part of the bread and cut the crusts off. Hey, I'm frugal - I hate throwing stuff like that out. I do recall making a white chocolate raspberry bread pudding a while ago for a girlfriend and she swore up and down there wasn't any bread in it. It was incredibly creamy - more like a brulee, but I digress. Last night's version had a firmer consistency and was packed with lemon zest and juice. Quite honestly it would have been over the top had I thought to add some of those little wild blueberries I've hiding in the freezer too. Darn! Souffle' like, it fell rather quickly which made the texture heavier rather than creamy, but it had flavor galore and that's what I was lookin' for. Download Lemon Bread Pudding

It was a lovely dinner for this lonely soul - ya I know. Enough of the pity party. The big guy'll be back in a couple of days and then I'll have to cook "real" meals. It's a good thing. I should be just about finished working off these extra calories on the elliptical by then. 

Comments

[Lea]

This post makes me think of my mom. She absolutely loved lemon. She absolutely loved bread pudding. She never put the two together, not quite sure why, I am sure she would have loved it. How is sweet Max today? Rita barked ALL night - I keep waking her up today...

[June]

Lea - It's funny how certain foods trigger memories, isn't it? The Maxer dawg is back to normal, whatever that is. I keep meaning to ask you how Rita's doing - what's with the barking?

[Mags]

I don't believe I've ever had bread pudding, neither sweet nor savory. You certainly do make it sound/look appetizing though.

Did you make some limoncello with all those lemons?

[June]

Mags - we still have 2 bottles of limoncello left from last year so I didn't bother, though it is a great way to make good use of them. I have a drawer full of lemons in the refrigerator and hopefully they'll last a few more weeks. Any ideas?

[Betty Prewitt]

I made this delight yesterday morning. Brian showed up when it was out of the oven 5 minutes. He got the first taste and loved it. I had made it for his dad since he didn't get any of the pumpkin pie bread pudding. Brian ended up taking half of it home and Dad got the rest (all but a little for me). I agree with the guys this is the best bread pudding ever!!

[June]

Betty - I really liked this one too as it's got a completely different texture than the pumpkin version, and of course you can't go wrong with lemon. So glad you enjoyed it!