Strawberry Banana Bread Pudding

Today is Miss Yunks’ BF’s birthday! The celebration began over the weekend with a special brunch at home.

Inspired by Jacki’s White Chocolate Blueberry Bread Pudding, I decided to make my own bread pudding.  I always have some bananas in my freezer and I also had one fresh.  I know he likes strawberries with bananas and decided to experiment with Strawberry Banana Bread Pudding.   I thought about attempting a low fat bread pudding, and then I thought screw that – this is a birthday! Plus, this is my first bread pudding.  Now that I’ve tasted how good a full fat version is, I will cut back on the next one and see if I notice a difference.  After tasting, BF said this bread pudding is one of the best things that ever came out of my kitchen.  The only other time he’s made a comment like that is when I made these eggplant bruschetta toasts.  Yeah, I remember these things.

Ingredients

1 loaf challah bread, cut into chunks
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup whole milk
4 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1-2 tblsp cinnamon
1-2 tsp nutmeg
1 tblsp brown sugar
2 bananas
1 package frozen halved strawberries (or fresh if they look good enough at your grocery store)
6 thin sliced of butter
extra brown sugar for sprinkling on top, about 1/4 cup

Directions

1.  Cut bread into chunks.  I had a very large loaf of challah so I used about 3/4 of it.  It was also a fresh loaf, not stale as it should be, so i put my chunks into the oven at 350 for a few minutes.  The bread started to toast so I removed the chunks.

2. Heat cream in sauce pan on stove
3. In mixing bowl, mix together milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar.  Add heated cream.
4. Spread bread chunks into a buttered baking dish.
5. Pour cream and milk mixture on top of bread and use fork to make sure each bread chunk is covered in liquid.

6. Cover dish with plastic wrap and keep in refrigerator overnight.
7. In the morning, defrost frozen strawberries and 1 frozen banana.  (Bananas keep in the freezer until you’re ready to bake with them.)  Slice 1 fresh banana.
8. In small mixing bowl, mix strawberries with their juice, 1 mashed banana (frozen bananas will be mushy after defrosting), and I also added in about 1/4 cup more milk and cream, and more sprinkles of cinnamon and nutmeg.
9. Drop the sliced banana into the soaked bread chunks and pour strawberry banana mixture over bread.  Mix around to well coat the bread.
10. Top with 6 evenly spaced thin slices of a stick of butter.  Sprinkle brown sugar over the butter.

11. Bake at 350 for about 50 minutes.

12. If desired, whip up some fresh whipped cream to serve on top of the bread pudding.

At this point my KitchenAid mixer fell apart.  The ring where the attachment is attached fell off.  Anyone know anything about fixing KitchenAids?

13. Serve and Enjoy!

You can use several different types of bread in a bread pudding, but challah works really well and I think brioche would work really well too.  Have fun experimenting with different flavors and add-ins, fruits and chocolate!  This Strawberry Banana Bread Pudding came out really well because of the overnight soaking and the different fruits.  The end result was very thick, pudding-like and full of strawberry and banana flavor.  BF doesn’t like desserts as a general rule and isn’t big on sweets, but I still feel like I should bake something for his birthday.  Luckily, he loved this bread pudding so feel free to bake this for the non-sweet-lover in your life, if you know any!