Pumpkin Bread Pudding

My good friend, Larry loves bread pudding. Whenever we get together, I don't need to ask what dessert he would like. I know his answer will be bread pudding. He's pretty much a bread pudding purist. I think it goes back to his childhood. His mom always made bread pudding with the leftover homemade bread. One time years ago, when I first decided to make bread pudding I asked Larry's mom for her recipe. She was such an old fashioned cook, no recipes for her. She said I just take some bread, eggs, milk and cinnamon and mix it all up and bake it. Maybe she said raisins, too. There's a few things I can make without a recipe but baking, I always have to follow a recipe.

I don't know if Larry would like the Pumpkin Bread pudding but we sure did. I made quite a few changes to the recipe. Mostly because of what I did or didn't have on hand. I cut the recipe in half and it worked nicely to fill three ramekins. I had leftover sweetened condensed and evaporated milk from this month's Martha Stewart recipe, Tres Leches Cupcakes. I was wondering what I was going to do with it when I had one of those aha moments. I can use it in the Pumpkin Bread Pudding. When we made the Pumpkin No vanilla beans for me, they're just too expensive. I do want to try vanilla bean paste. I didn't have any whole cloves or fresh ginger. My spice mixture consisted of vanilla extract, a pinch of ground cloves, a pinch of ground ginger and two cinnamon sticks. I felt like the pudding was plenty moist by itself, so I decided to forgo the sauce. We certainly don't need anything else made with cream.




This is a delicious dessert. Kind of fun to have a pumpkin dessert in Springtime. I am going to file this one in my holiday file. This would make a great addition to the Thanksgiving Day table.

Thanks to Carmen of Baking Is My Zen for choosing a great recipe. You can find the links to check out the other SMS bakers here.