Baked bread pudding with Caramel

Bread pudding is one of the simplest recipes that can be prepared using leftover in the kitchen. I love baking this on a lazy sunday morning and enjoy it hot or cold.



My MIL loves this pudding and the best part is it does not take a long time to make. This time around I gave it a little twist with some carmelized sauce and it turned out pretty neat.

Here goes the list of ingredients:

• 2 cups of shredded stale bread
• 2 cups of hot milk
• 3/4 cup Sugar
• 1 tbsp Ghee or clarified butter
• 1/4 tsp of Salt
• 3 eggs
• 1 tsp Vanilla
• 1 tsp of Cinnamon powder
• 1/4 tsp of Nutmeg powder
• 1/4 tsp of Clove powder
• 4 tbsp of sugar (for the carmel sauce)
• A few drops of water (for the caramel sauce)
• 2 drops of lemon juice (for caramel sauce)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to a 175 deg c. Lightly grease a cake tin with butter or oil.
2. Ensure that you stuff 2 cups with shredded bread pieces. Now empty this into the container that has the hot milk. combine gently.
3. Add the sugar, Ghee, salt, eggs, vanilla and the three different powders. Mix gently.
4. Set this mixture aside.
5. Now take a wok and put it on simmer.
6. Add the Sugar and keep stirring till the sugar starts melting and them add a few drops of water.
7. Continue to stir till the mixture turns light brown. Add the lemon juice. This is done primarly to avoid the sugar from crystallization.
8. As you continue to stir you see the mixture turn golden brown. Switch off the gas and immediately pour this mixture into the cake tin.
9. Now pour the bread mixture on top of this and pop it into the oven.
10. You will need to keep the cake tin in a water bath to avoid the pudding from getting burnt.
11. You can do this by filling a tray with water and keeping the cake tin in the tray.
12. Bake this mixture for about an hour. Allow it to rest in the oven after baking it and then let it cool completely before serving.
13. You may keep it in the fridge and serve it the next day instead. Enjoy!!

Eggless Cake - Pure Vegetarian Cake

Neccesity is the mother of invention.

Why am I talking philosophy on this blog you may say. Actually last week my son happened to come down with Chicken pox.

In India it is believed that a very light diet helps in reducing the effect of Chicken pox and helps in healing of the scars faster. Though the doctor believes that this is a myth and we need to follow a normal diet, I strongly believe there is some truth to this theory that our forefathers have imbibed in us.

It was this belief that made me abstain my son from any sort of non-vegetarian food including eggs. Now comes the reason as to why I started with that statements. One of those days when he got so bored of the bland food that he wanted me to bake a cake. I am a firm believer that a good cake can only be baked with eggs and this got me in a dilemma. After searching for a while I nailed down a recipe that had no eggs and is totally vegetarian. This was handed over to me by my SIL.

The base ingredient to this cake is milk and milk products and can be baked in a microwave or an OTG. My sis-in-law who gave me the original recipe(which I changed to my fancy:)) uses a cooker to bake this cake.

I thought of all the people who keep telling me that they can not bake because of the limitation of not having a microwave or an oven I thought this is a boon. My recipes are all tried and tested as you see and this one too had to be in a cooker if I had to tell my friends that they could bake too in a primitive oven (Read Cooker) of sorts.

To my surprise this cake did come out pretty good though I must say it is a little milky since the base ingredient is milk and milk products.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup condensed Milk

3/4 cup Milk Powder or Dairy Whitener

2 cups of Whole Wheat Flour

1/2 Cup Sugar

1 1/2 Cup Milk

1/2 cup fresh cream

1/2 cup Yoghurt

1 tbsp Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1 tsp vanilla essence

Method:

1. Keep a steel stand inside a cooker. This is to hold the cake tin so that it does not rest at the bottom of the cooker. Now let it simmer without the whistle.


2. Mix all the wet ingredients first in a seperate bowl using a whisker.


3. Mix all the dry ingredients seperately in a bowl.


4. Add the dry mixture slowly into the wet incorporating it slowly into the wet mixture until all the ingredients are well combined.


5. Now take a cake tin and grease it with little oil and sprinkle some flour on it.


6. Pour the cake mixture into this tin and slowly lower the cake tin into the cooker and leave it to simmer for the next one hour.


7. After about an hour check the doneness of the cake with a fork or a tooth pick.


8. Your eggless cake is ready to be served. Enjoy!!
   

P.S:

You can use the oven to bake this cake too. Preheat it to 170 deg c and then pop this mixture for 1/2 hour to 45 minutes and the cake will be ready.

Instead of 2 cups of flour you can use 1 1/2 cup of whole wheat Flour and 1/2 cup of cocoa powder to make a chocolate cake instead of the plain vanilla.

The original recipe called for 1 cup oil instead of 1/2 cup of cream and 1/2 cup of Yoghurt. You can try that version too. Use vegetable oil such as Sunflower oil in that case.