French Toast Bread Pudding

I recently posted about using Challah bread to make French toast.  Here's what I did with the second loaf I bought that day.



Sometimes my lady friends and I get together and have a potluck lunch.  Lately though, we've been having to get together and have potluck breakfasts, due to scheduling conflicts.  Potluck breakfast is interesting, there's only so many things you can take to someone else's house that will stay hot and fresh during the journey.

I'm not so sure that scrambled eggs would make it, for example.

After our French toast dinner, I had some Challah bread to finish up.  And while I think French toast might be in the same catagory as the eggs in terms of transport, I knew I wanted to do something similar, like a French toast casserole.

How many times can I say "French Toast" in this blog entry?  Anyone tired of it yet?  Ready to slam your head on the keyboard yet?  Or maybe you're on an iPad or phone or something, kinda hard to slam your head on a keyboard then.  My phone does have a keyboard, which I'm now wishing I didn't insist on having, but I'm not so sure I could slam my head on it.

ahem.

I don't have a recipe for French toast casserole, and I was feeling too lazy to look it up.  I mean, really, I'd have to go all the way into the other room where the laptop is, fire it up, search for French toast casserole, weed through all the entries that require ingredients I don't have...

It was just all to exhausting to even think about.

Since I'd very recently made a Bread Pudding, I thought that might just work.

I got the Bread Pudding recipe from the Pioneer Woman here:

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2007/06/bread_pudding_f/

This is a fantastic bread pudding, in that it calls for sourdough bread in place of a normal white bread, and really gives it a depth of flavor that's well, yummy.

I followed the recipe, except for using Challah bread instead of sourdough, and I left out the pecans.  Mainly because I didn't have any, and I usually don't have any unless I planned ahead, and I don't usually do that.  Also, I cut up the bread and poured the mixture on the night before the breakfast, and let the milky/eggy/vanillay/buttery goodness soak into the bread all night.  The next morning I baked the pudding for 70 minutes at 325, and it was perfectly puffed up by the time it was done.

It was a thing of beauty, I tell ya.  I'm only sorry I never got a picture of any of it.

Instead of the whiskey sauce, which is really sweet and good, I wanted to go with a fruit-y type sauce.  I was hoping for strawberry, but we were out of the frozen ones, and fresh ones aren't quite in season enough for me yet.  It came down to peaches or cherries, and I went with cherries.

I boiled 2 cups of water, adding in 1 1/2 cups of sugar.  I let that boil down a bit, then added 1/2 bag of frozen tart cherries (1/2 a bag, because that was all I had left.  I would have liked more in the sauce though)  and let that boild down a bit.  I realized the sauce was very thin, so I made up a cornstarch and water mixture to add to the sauce to thicken it up a bit. 

It wasn't enough, so I did another cornstarch/water mixture.  It still wasn't as thick as I would have liked, but I was running out of time and had to get to the breakfast.  The sauce turned out to be a nice companion to the pudding, and also to our French toast the next night.