Bread pudding recipe

I can't remember if I have already mentioned this, but our (now-not-so)

Bread pudding 

trusty bread machine gave up the ghost while we were in Cullera. Something went wrong with the spindle so the paddle wasn't strong enough to knead the dough anymore. A fairly major problem and not one that we could fix with a new paddle or pan. So, until we get back to the UK when we might buy another, I'm now baking our daily loaf entirely by hand. It's actually not that time-consuming and I get to feel pretty smug! In the words of the Helen Arney song, 'I knitted it myself'.

However, this makes me even less happy about wasting any, even when the ickle sparrows peer hopefully at our lunch. So I brushed off this bread pudding recipe. I've taken to putting our left over bread pieces into a tub to dry out and, once a week or so, make bread pudding. I blogged a different version last year which uses fresher sliced bread and makes a much lighter pudding to eat warm with custard. This one is better served in cold slabs and, preferably, eaten the day after making to give the spices time to mature. Sometimes we manage to wait that long.

Ingredients
8oz dry, stale bread
Cold water
2oz butter
4oz sultanas
2oz brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg, beaten
Splash of milk

Tear the bread into small pieces and put it into a large bowl. Discard any really tough crusts. Add water to the bowl until all the bread is soaking. Leave for at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 170 and grease a baking tin with a little of the butter.

Strain the soaked bread through a sieve and squeeze it to remove as much water as possible. Mash bread with a fork.

Add sultanas, sugar and spices. Mix well.
Add beaten egg and enough milk to enable the mixture to drop easily from a spoon. Mix well.

Pour mixture into greased tin and bake at 170c for about an hour. Leave to cool and cut into squares. Store in an airtight tub.

You can substitute any dried fruit and peel for the sultanas depending on what you like or have available. This is a great use-up recipe so be imaginative! Also, the original paper scrap I typed this post from specifies 1 tsp of ground mixed spice which I can't get in Spain, so tweaking the spice blend is optional. The last batch of this I made had 1 tbsp of vanilla sugar in place of the same volume of brown sugar which imparted a nice vanilla richness.