Baking - pictures.

[curiouswombat]

I have a couple of pictures to go with yesterday's recipes. But first - bread pudding vs bread and butter pudding.

In the parlance of most of Britain, these are not the same thing. And it seems as if North Americans call what we know as Bread and Butter Pudding, Bread Pudding. It's another of those food conundrums like biscuits...

The dish made with sliced bread, buttered and layered, usually with some type of fruit addition, then covered with egg custard mixture and baked until the bread crisps and the custard sets, is known to most of us over here as Bread and Butter Pudding. Here is a basic recipe with picture.

Bread pudding is made by taking stale bread, breaking it into chunks, and soaking it in milk, or even water, for a while. Then squeezing out the excess fluid, adding spices, sugar, an egg, and dried fruit, pressing it into a baking tin and baking it. Here is a recipe and picture of Bread Pudding. Bread pudding is eaten in a hunk like cake rather than with a spoon!

As for Wet Nelly - this was made like bread pudding - except left over cake was used and so it needed less soaking, more just damping down. Then, at least at our local bakery when I was a child, this mixture was baked between two layers of shortcrust pastry, and sprinkled with sugar. So - it was recycling old cake into new!

Anyway - pictures of fruitloaf and gingerbread

The problem is that two different brown cakes looks rather boring...




Even when you get closer to them...



But they do taste good!

Comments

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

I think it looks quite good.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thank you - they taste fine, any way!

[chaotic-binky.livejournal.com]

I put a huge dollop of marmalade in my bread pudding. Also, I add just enough milk to wet the bread so I do not have to squeeze it out - shudders! There are some things I just do not like to touch.

My bread pudding comes out much darker than the picture in the recipe - not sure why as I use the same amount of mixed spice.

Your cakes look yummy!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Marmalade would be excellent. I rally have an urge to make bread pudding now.

And the cakes taste good - it is a pity we can't post the aroma, too - as the mixture of gingerbread and fruit-loaf is good when you lift the lid of the cake tin.

[shirebound]

Yum yum. :)

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Such a shame we can't e-mail cake!

[brutti-ma-buoni.livejournal.com]

Belatedly realising it is you who is to blame for me buying gingerbread yesterday when I really didn't need it. But today I stewed rhubarb to go with it. So it is now Officially Healthy.

I'm fairly sure your cakes don't taste boring, even if they aren't the most photogenic.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

All my fault, I plead guilty.

The cakes do taste good, I must admit!

[clodia-metelli.livejournal.com]

mmmmmmmmm /drools a bit

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Such a shame cake doesn't e-mail very well....

[manoah.livejournal.com]

Gosh I love gingerbread!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

It is such an easy thing to make, too. A real winner!

[keswindhover.livejournal.com]

Let us not forget that special quality of bread pudding that makes it sit in your stomach like a brick. I am trying to imagine anyone going jogging after eating bread pudding - and failing.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh, yes! I'm pretty sure it must have sunk half a dozen swans, too!

[mrowe.livejournal.com]

Note to self: acquire stale bread...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

A good bread pudding should be all the food you need for a couple of days, really :)

[estelcontar1.livejournal.com]

They look totally yummy! I'm kind of hungry so they're most definitely making my mouth water.

Bread pudding is very popular here. It's not one of my favourite sweets though.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Cupcakes are prettier - but gingerbread is one of my favourites I have to say.

I do like both sorts of bread pudding, but just occasionally. The conversation about them began over at Faerie and brought them to mind.

[diebirchen.livejournal.com]

The teapot is charming!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thank you - I have the cups and saucers, too.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

The gingerbread looks lovely, dark and moist.
It's too bad Manolo refuses to eat anything with sultanas or fruit that's not citrus or pineapple cooked in it. Silly man.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

You can see why, after all these years, that is still the gingerbread recipe that I use!

And yes - what a shame you can't persuade him to eat fruit cakes.

[myrhiann.livejournal.com]

whilst the recipe for Bread and Butter pudding made it to the antipodes, I had not heard of the other two. When I was learning cooking at High School the recipe book had a boiled fruit cake called Eggless Brownie, baked in a roasting tin. It used butter and dried fruit boiled up with water and sugar. When cool you mixed plain flour and baking soda into it, then baked it. It was very tasty and ket well. Improved with keeping actually. I used to make one every week, which I would slice and butter for elevenses. I had 5 young children and it made a healthier alternative to biscuits and other sweet stuff. Actually, I think I might reduce the ingredients and make a smaller one for myself, when the weather gets cold.

I also have a recipe for Banana bread, which I have tweaked over the years, reducing the quantity of sugar as I don't like sweet stuff, and adding chopped dates and walnuts to it. That is very nice too. Looking at your pics makes me feel hungry. Your gingerbread and fruit loaf both look very yummy!

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

My mother made that boiled fruit cake. We called it Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake (http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,186,143165-233205,00.html) or War Cake (since it was popular when there was wartime rationing). I made it for my Dad when he was visiting a few weeks ago.

War Cake

[(Anonymous)]

That would be the one. The original recipe called for lard, but since butter is easier to obtain these days I used that. I can see why it was 'war cake'. I would think even getting the dried fruit would have been an epic battle. We had rationing in Australia too.

Re: War Cake

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I guess in America they might have been able to dried some of their own vine fruits - whereas it was the period where bakers in the UK were experimenting with adding root vegetables to cake to eke it out - and boiling the dried fruit, or soaking it in water or tea, would have plumped it up to make it look 'more' - and make for a moister cake from poorer quality currants, I guess!

Plain cakes were 'plainer' too I think. Nowadays when I make a plain cake to sandwich with jam I use a Victoria mixture - but when I was a child I remember a more solid plain cake - I think it had more flour than butter or sugar, and possible milk instead of some of the eggs. It was one of my grandfather's favourites, sandwiched together with frosting flavoured with cocoa. Frosting rather than butter cream as it had milk as well as the utter - again a more frugal version.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

They are the sort of family recipes that we really need to keep - and encourage people to bake!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I think I have another boiled fruitcake recipe somewhere, too - they were very popular - and easy to make too. And this one (http://curiouswombat.livejournal.com/277630.html) which is eggless and fatless - although that one is certainly not a UK wartime one.

It's a pity they don't teach such proper baking in most schools any more.

I do a banana and cherry which is pretty sweet - but then we just cut it without buttering and regard it as a cake rather than a bread.

[slaymesoftly.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar enough with bread pudding to know which I've had or how they were made. (all I know is it's usually tasty - but often quite different) Must ask my oldest son if he knows. It's his favorite dessert and he tries the bread pudding everywhere he eats if they have it on the menu. Perhaps the differences we see or taste are because sometimes he's getting bread and butter pudding and sometimes bread pudding. :)

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I think it is one of those things that almost every country will have a variant of - and there will be different variants in different parts of each country too!

So quite fun to try in different places. There are variants in the comments here, or the chatter at Faerie, that include sultanas, raisins, mixed fruit, marmalade, strawberry jam and mincemeat - some with spice, some without, and so on. Also some with plain white bread, some with brioche, some with cinnamon rolls... I guess, in the fist place, you added whatever you had to the stale bread. Nowadays you can use what gives you the best taste!

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Actually, what most people in the U.S. call bread pudding is a combination of your two recipes, although closer to your bread-and-butter pudding. In its simplest form, American bread pudding is made with stale bread, cubed or broken into small pieces, NOT buttered, soaked in mixture of eggs, milk, sugar, and flavoring -- usually vanilla and/or cinammon -- and then baked. Raisins are an optional addition. Then there are all kinds of variations -- my sister-in-law makes a fantastic pumpkin bread pudding with caramel sauce at Thanksgiving, and I sometimes make one in which French bread cubes are toasted with butter in the oven, then combined with homemade applesauce and a custard mixture and baked. Good thing I'm stuffed from our Superbowl party or I'd want to go make that one right now.

I've seen recipes for bread-and-butter pudding very much like the one you linked to in American cookbooks -- there's one in my '70s Fannie Farmer, which is based on an old New England cookbook -- but I've never tried it myself or even seen it on a restaurant menu. And I don't think I'd ever even heard of bread pudding made without eggs until you posted about it! So many baked goods, so little time...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Yes - we realised, after Binkie mentioned bread pudding and someone in the US clearly meant the version with the egg custard mix, that you version was closer to what her and I call bread and butter pudding.

There are so many variations world-wide but then I guess this is not surprising as they are all ways of using up left-over bread of one sort or another in one way or another!

So the idea or pumpkin bread is alien to me - but adding mincemeat would probably seem as odd to your sister-in-law.

The reason that the UK custard-based version is made with buttered bread is because it will have been made with left over bread from tea-time - so already buttered. The butter would make the custard richer as, in the everyday version, there would not have been cream.

And now I want to try your variant with stewed apple! As you say; so many baked goods, so little time...

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

They all look wonderful!