Banana Bread Pudding

I finally finished all my grad school applications and wanted to get back into the groove of cooking. Missed it so much!

So it must have been all the bread pudding I've been seeing on TV lately, but the sound of a nice warm bread pudding with an ice cream scoop on top was music to my ears - and mouth.

Basically, slices of bread is soaked in a yummy custard for this pudding.

For the custard, combine milk, cream, and sugar in a pot and boil down. The vanilla is added to the pot after being removed from the heat.

In another bowl, eggs were whisked with sugar. A ladle of the milk mixture was whisked into the eggs to balance the temperature of the eggs so it wouldn't curdle and cook when whisked back into the milk. Strain the mixture and let the custard cool.

For the brioche, cut the crusts from the loaf and cut into slices.

Toast the slices on both sides under the broiler until golden brown.

Once the custard and brioche slices are ready, spread a quarter of an inch of the custard on the bottom of a baking pan. Lay half of the bread slices and pour a ladle of the custard on top of the slices soaking them. Let them soak up for one minute.

Cut bananas and lay them over the bread.

Soak the remaining slices of bread in the custard and lay them over the bananas. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand.

Remove the plastic wrap and cover with parchment paper and foil. Put the baking pan into a bigger pan and pour in the hot water into the bigger pan. This will help keep the bread pudding nice and moist when baking.

Bake the pudding for 1 hour, remove the water, and refrigerate for at least 6 hours. Make clarified butter by heating up butter in a small saucepan and skimming off any impurities that float up.

Using this clarified butter in a pan, cook the bread pudding that has been removed and cleaned from the custard. Cook them cut side down for a few minutes.

After they were done, I added a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream - yummmm.

You can add syrup, berry sauce, chocolate sauce, or anything you want. No fruits or other fruits can be used as well.

In my opinion, the bananas that I used were not ripe enough for me. I wish the bananas in the pudding were softer than they were. Make sure to use ripe bananas!