Raspberry Bread Pudding

When the days grow shorter and the evenings dark sooner, comfort food calls my name more often. The last few days the call was for some reason for bread pudding. I like mine served both warm and cold, so I made enough so that Sweetie and I could enjoy it warm one evening and then again another day served cold. The star of the pudding was the fresh, zesty raspberries. They were a great counterpoint to the mild and milky flavors from the bread, milk, eggs and almond extract. Some lemon zest added another layer of flavor. It's a great way to use up stale bread, too.

My usual way to make bread pudding is with raisins and lemon zest and some vanilla as the flavorings, but I have made it with other enhancements and I've made it savory, too. It really is a versatile treat. You can bake it in a wide casserole, for more crispy pieces, or in a narrow dish for more soft custardy bites.

This is an easy dish to make and truly worth the minimal time. The recipe is over 50 years old and given by a friend, then updated with the raspberries and switching to almond extract. It might not look like much, but everyone loves this pudding.

Bread Pudding with Raspberries      

A variation on a recipe from 1971, from a Fredricksburg, Maryland friend, Gale 

5 cups dry bread cubes            1/4 teaspoon salt           

3 cups milk, scalded                 1 teaspoon almond extract            

1 tablespoon butter                  1 1/2 cups fresh raspberries                  

4 slightly beaten eggs              1/4 cup golden raisins             

3/4 cup sugar                         

½ teaspoon lemon zest                                 

                       

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2) Melt the butter in the milk. Add a little of the milk to the beaten eggs, then add eggs to rest of milk. Stir in the sugar, lemon zest, salt, and almond extract.

3) Put the bread cubes in a large bowl. Pour the egg/milk mixture over, stir gently, and let sit 15 minutes.

4) Butter a large baking pan. A deep one will give a softer center, a shallower one will give more crispy crust. Gently stir raspberries and raisins into bread mixture and pour into baking pan.

5) Bake in a pan of hot water until firm, about 1 hour. Serve warm.

Almost Mary Berry Bakewell Delight

There is something about the combination of flavors and textures of a Bakewell Tart that I just love. There is the custardy almond filling juxtaposed with the raspberry jam and a nice crust, too. It smells heavenly of raspberry and almond, too.

The Bakewell Tart is a British favorite. Recently I borrowed a Mary Berry book from the library. She was the female of the two judges on the first six episodes or so of the Great British Baking Show and she has a nice, easy way with recipes. The Bakewell Tart was in her Fast Cakes - Everyday Cakes  book.

As I do, I messed with the recipe right off the bat. I had a nice round sheet of ready made pie pastry in the fridge which I wanted to use up, so instead of the given tart crust, I used that. I also put it into a deep dish pie plate instead of into a fluted tart pan. Because of my dairy allergy, I used room temperature non-dairy butter for the filling.You'll notice that if you use weights for your ingredients that the butter, sugar and almond flour are all very similar weights...4 oz... and the jam is half that. Proportions are such an important of baking!

 Beyond swapping out the pastry for the tart dough and using margarine instead of real butter, I pretty much stuck to the recipe until right before I put it into the oven, when I folded over the excess pastry from the sides of the pan, folding it over the almond filling as you would a crostata. I also topped the filling, just inside that folded pastry, with halved fresh raspberries...just a few for decoration, really.

This pastry is sublime, especially if you like raspberry jam, which I do. The pastry is flaky and golden, the filling is soft and delectable, and the jam ties the almond flavors to the fruit flavor. Do try it!

For those who follow this blog to know a bit about what is happening in our life, Sweetie is in the midst of another project. This time it is a door replacement on the farmhouse. As usual he is doing a super job. This will be a fairly utilitarian door, so I probably won't even post photos. It allow safety access from the bedrooms to the east side of the property in case of fire or another disaster. It's entirely possible that it will be used rarely, but it's still good to know that, once ready to use, I can stop worrying about people getting stuck in a bedroom in a disaster.

On the creative front, I'm making some more tea cups on painted table legs for going in the garden. They are meant for decoration, but do also hold water or seed for birds. I'll post some photos once they are finished.

Almond Bakewell Pastry
based on a recipe by Mary Berry
Serves 8

1 round ReadyCrust pie pastry or pie dough for 1 crust
1/2 cup (4 oz, 114g, 1 stick) butter, softened (I used non-dairy margarine)
1/2 cup (4 oz, 100g) sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (4 oz, 100g) almond flour
1 teaspoon almond extract
4 tablespoons (1/4 cup) raspberry jam
a few sliced or slivered almonds (or raspberries in my case)

Line a 9" pie plate with the pie crust dough, rolled out thinly. Prick the bottom all over and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F/Convection 350 degrees F (I used 375 degrees F) and put a baking sheet in the oven on the shelf just above the center. (Putting the filled pie tin on this preheated metal sheet helps crisp up the bottom crust.)

For the filling, put the butter and sugar into a mixer or food processor and mix until fluffy and light. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix again until thoroughly incorporated. Add the almond flour and the almond extract and mix one last time until thoroughly mixed.

Spread the base of the pie dough with the jam evenly, then pour the filling over the top. Fold down any pastry dough that is above the filling, overlapping as necessary, and then scatter almonds or place halved fresh raspberries over the filling randomly or in a nice pattern.

Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes (because I used a higher heat, mine took a little less than 20 minutes with Convection), or until the pastry is pale golden brown at the edges and the filling is set.

Leave to cool in the pie plate. Serve cut into wedges.

Ooo La La!

One of the pleasures of being invited to dinner is that hostesses who know me often ask me to bring dessert. I guess my obsession with baking has become well known.

Last weekend I was asked to bring a salad and dessert. The salad included tomatoes and cucumber from our garden. The dessert included raspberries from the market and beautiful plump ripe blackberries from our yard. This year promised to have a bumper crop of blackberries and since they are essentially weeds, there are a lot of those berry bearing brambles to pick from. At the moment most of the berries are still red and not ripe and even some that are black are teasing. They are tart enough to bring a pucker to your mouth. Finding the ripe, sweet ones requires a bit of effort, but it was worth it for the flavor they brought to this French style tart.

The recipe was one I found at the King Arthur Flour site and the fruit they used was pears. The crust used almond flour and the filling also used almond flour, plus almond extract, so the almond quotient was high. I made the tart in a narrow rectangular tart pan and had rows of berries marching up and down in the filling instead of pears. Not only did it taste amazing, but it looked so good that our host asked which bakery I had bought it in. I told him the bakery around the corner since my bake center where it was created is around the corner from the main kitchen.

This tart takes a little time, but isn't really difficult. Be kind to yourself and purchase fresh almond flour. King Arthur sells a good one, but so does Bob's Red Mill and you can sometimes find almond flour at health food stores, too. If you can't find it, you can make some yourself by putting blanched almonds into a food processor with a few tablespoons of the sugar called for in the recipe and pulsing it until it becomes flour. Keep an eye on it so that it doesn't become a paste and be sure to sift the finished flour to remove any large pieces of almond that didn't get fully ground up.

Use the best berries you can find. If you wash them, be sure to dry them well. For the jam on the bottom, I put a tablespoon of seedless raspberry jam and the juice of a quarter of a lemon into a small heat-proof bowl and microwaved it briefly to melt the jam, then stirred it well. Use a pastry brush to make a thin layer of the jam on the bottom of the tart. It adds flavor and keeps any juices from the fruit from invading the crust.

Raspberry Blackberry Almond Tart

based on a recipe from King Arthur Flour

Glaze:

1 tablespoon seedless raspberry jam

juice of 1/4 medium lemon

 Crust

1/3 cup sugar

5 tablespoons soft butter

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup (1 3/4 ounces) almond flour or finely ground almonds

Filling

3 tablespoons soft butter

1/4 teaspoon salt

2/3 cup sugar

1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

2 large eggs

3/4 cup almond flour or finely ground almonds

1/2 pint fresh raspberries

1/2 pint fresh blackberries

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

To make the jam glaze: In a heat-proof small bowl combine the jam and the lemon juice. Microwave briefly to soften the jam.

To make the crust: Beat together the sugar, butter, salt, and flavorings.

Add the flours, stirring to make crumbs that cling together when squeezed.

Press the crumbs into the bottom and up the sides of a 4 1/4" x 13 3/4" tart pan; prick it all over with a fork.

Chill the crust in the freezer for 15 minutes, then bake it in the preheated 350 degree F oven until it's just beginning to brown on the edges, 18 to 22 minutes.

Remove it from the oven.

 Cool on a wire rack.

 Once cool, brush a thin layer of the raspberry jam glaze over the bottom of the tart crust.

To make the filling: Beat together the butter, salt, sugar, flour, and almond extract.

Beat in the eggs, then add the almond flour, stirring just to combine.

To assemble the tart: Spread the filling in the bottom of the crust.

Place the dry raspberries and blackberries in rows on top of the filling, pressing them down gently so the bottom of the berries are covered.

Bake the tart in the preheated 350 degree F oven for 45 to 40 minutes, until the top is lightly browned. Cool slightly before serving. 

Buttermilk and Cherries

We are in that season where much of the fruit available in the markets are imported, except for apples and pears. Pears are often not ripe and I made apple crisp last time this friend was over for dinner, so yesterday I decided to make a dessert with things on hand. I had some buttermilk, eggs, and butter in the fridge and a jar of pitted sweet dark cherries in the pantry.

 A short amount of time on the internet led me to a lovely recipe for a moist, fluffy, tender single layer cake with cherries. Well, the recipe actually used raspberries, but I knew cherries would work well with the cake. I also used almond extract instead of vanilla because almond flavor brings out the cherry flavor so well and these were not fresh fruit, so could use that bit of help. Otherwise I mostly followed the recipe and we enjoyed the cake after dinner. It was not too much, and not too little...just right.

Cherry Buttermilk Cake
based on Raspberry Buttermilk Cake in
Gourmet, June 2009, by Melissa Roberts

Simple, tender buttermilk cake topped with a nice, sugary crunch and enriched with cherries

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 stick unsalted butter, room temperature

2/3 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

1 large egg, room temperature

1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk, room temperature

1 cup pitted cherries (I used some that had been canned in a jar and drained off the juice used to pack them, but fresh cherries would be even better), drained

1 tablespoon soft butter and 3 tablespoons sugar for the pan

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar, preferably sanding sugar, for the topping

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F, with rack in the middle. Butter the bottom and sides of a 9-inch cake pan, then coat with the sugar, shaking out any excess into the sink. Set aside.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cardamom.

Beat butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes, then beat in the almond extract. Add egg and beat well.

At low speed, beat in 1/2 of the flour mixture, the buttermilk, then the rest of the flour mixture, beating only until combined each time.

Spoon batter into prepared pan, smoothing top. Scatter the drained cherries evenly over the top. Sprinkle top with the sanding sugar. Bake in preheated oven for 25 - 30 minutes, or until cake is golden and a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool in the pan 10 minutes, then run a knife blade around the sides of the pan to loosen the cake and turn it out onto a rack. Invert onto a serving plate and let cool 10 - 15 minutes more. Cherries will have sunk to the bottom of the cake, and the top will be crunchy with sugar.

Serves 8