Brioche and Bread Pudding

I love love love bread. Especially in autumn. I normally use the dough setting on my bread maker to do the needing and the first rise, but I don't bake in it because I prefer a thinner crust than the machine delivers. It saves so much on time and clean-up. 

My youngest son doesn't trust me to not sneak in some healthy ingredients. He considers everything that's not white to be whole wheat and he'd rather go without - forever - than eat whole wheat!  He prefers store bought, white sandwich bread. I think any sandwich tastes better with home baked peasant style bread. I walk by the bakery at the grocery store and swoon over all the artisan bread you can find now, but I'm too cheap  frugal to buy it when it's so simple to bake your own. So when I stumbled across the  Artisan Bread in Five minutes a Day website I was pretty thrilled. They use a technique that doesn't involve kneading. When I saw the book at Chapters, I couldn't not buy it even though I swore I could find any recipe I needed online, and that I would never buy another cookbook. 

This week I made Brioche. 

You can find the recipe and the technique here.   

You can see that I didn't use a brioche pan and I didn't add the little "tete" on top either.

It didn't matter.

Yum, yum, yum. 

We ate it smeared with butter along with a bowl of turkey soup, toasted with home made grape jelly, toasted and dripping with honey and I used it to make the most amazing bread pudding. 

You should try it.

Apple Cinnamon Bread Pudding with Maple Sauce.

In an 8" square pan, lay out evenly :

4 cups cubed Brioche 

2 smallish apples, chopped ( I used empire ) 

Combine and sprinkle over the bread and apples:

1/3 cup sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

Wisk together and pour over the bread:

3 large eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup cream 

( or you could substitute 2 cups milk ) 

2 tsp vanilla

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until set.

Serve warm drizzled with Maple Sauce.

Maple Sauce

Combine in a small saucepan and simmer until the sugar melts:

1/3 cup maple sugar

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup butter 

Sprinkling the sugar and cinnamon on top rather than mixing with the eggs and milk makes the bread and apples all crispy on the top. 

mmm - that's just it. 

<3 Karen