About a month ago, our local grocery store was handing out samples of chocolate swirl brioche bread (which is essentially Chocolate Babka) and they were SO GOOD! My husband loved it and naturally my response was “this is easy. I can make this at home.” So a challenge was issued by him which I accepted. I wanted my buttery brioche bread to be super rich with a deep chocolate flavour. Three tries later I got pretty close to perfection. Not quite there but still pretty close. And it was amazing! We devoured that third one in a couple of days. I also made a rich, buttery cinnamon babka for good measure too! This post however is about those first two very delicious but not so perfect chocolate babkas that we were left with. They did taste great but the first one just didn’t have enough chocolate for me and the second one stubbornly refused to rise in the middle for some reason. Of course I wasn’t going to throw them out (gasp!) and I still wanted them to feel special at the same time. After all they had been the stepping stones in my quest for the perfect chocolate swirl brioche. So I gave them new life by transforming them into what you see below. Bittersweet chocolate swirls swimming in delicious warm custard and paired with fresh tangy raspberries and then topped with crunchy buttery pieces of brioche and a delightfully rich chocolate fudge sauce. Yup, it’s just as good as it sounds. And that’s how my chocolate babka casualties were turned into pots (ramekins?) of gold. Chocolate Babkas are everywhere this time of year. It’s a popular Christmas recipe, and the holidays are a wonderful excuse to indulge a little and chocolate babkas fit the bill perfectly. It’s made with Brioche which is a wonderful yellow hued bread that gets that amazing richness and flavour from butter and egg yolks and dark chocolate layers in between. This is also why brioche is great for bread puddings. The same idea applies to rich, buttery pastry such as French croissants that are also perfect to make croissant bread pudding. I added the raspberries because I cannot imagine a bread pudding without some kind of berry (just like my raspberry croissant bread pudding!). My mother used to make an amazing (dairy-free) queen of puddings and that creamy bread pudding and meringue separated by a warm layer of jam always made cold winter nights very enjoyable (even with that scoop of ice cream I always added to it, winter or not). For those who don’t know what queen of puddings is, here is a queen of puddings recipe. Although truth be told, I will always prefer my mother’s over anything else.
A few notes about this dessert
This recipe can also be made in a 7 x 9 inch dish and that will be just fine. Or you could make them in 6 ounce ramekins (about 6 portions) You can make these with any kind of bread recipe, or even chocolate or Nutella swirled bread. Brioche just has a richer taste. You need to layer them with soaked bread at the bottom and then raspberries (which can be fresh or frozen or fresh frozen like I did).
When filling these with the milk mix, make sure there is a half centimeter gap between the fill line and the top edge of the ramekin. Why? The custard will expand when baking and will flow out of the ramekin if it’s completely full. Trust me on this one. Here I have used 4 ounce ramekins and they turned out to be a little too small to contain all that delicious goodness of the bread pudding. Which is why I’m suggesting 6 ounce ramekins.
In my opinion, a perfect bread pudding should have pockets of beautiful silky custard visible amongst all the soaked chunky bread pieces. Here I have used fresh raspberries (that I quickly froze, hence fresh frozen) because I really like the tartness that these berries yield to this rich dessert. I usually buy an excess of fresh berries when they are on sale and immediately put them in the freezer for days like this when I just have to have a berry fix. Plus they taste better than the frozen berries in the store. You can serve these warm (or even cold if you like) with maybe a dusting of powdered sugar? Or some chocolate fudge sauce?Maybe even whipped cream? I love eating this while it’s still warm and soft. That’s how I’ve always had bread pudding. And with a scoop of ice cream on top. This time I didn’t have any ice cream in the freezer (I blame the weather for that!) so I topped it with this amazing chocolate fudge sauce. The custard layer in this bread pudding was delicious and I love how the chocolate swirls merged with the custard and the soft bread chunks. The crispy/crunchy golden brown bread at the top is a wonderful addition to the texture as well. And those bright red/pink patches you see in the pudding are where the raspberries used to be. They provide that sweet sourness which pairs wonderfully with the creamy richness of the chocolate bread pudding. There is certainly more than meets the eye in this amazing dessert in terms of all those lovely flavours and textures. Mr K loves eating this pudding cold. I don’t get it. But each to his own. How do you like your bread pudding? Warm or cold? With whipped cream? Ice cream? Chocolate sauce? Or something else entirely? Let me know in the comments. You can keep this in the fridge for about 3 days (that’s how long ours lasted), and then just warm it up in the microwave before eating it (unless of course you’re part of some alien species that likes to eat bread pudding cold like my husband). So Christmas is only two weeks away. This is my first Christmas with Mr K and we are going to be building a Gingerbread house together (along with a beautiful pavlova too!) this year which will hopefully be a holiday tradition for us going forward. You will see and hear more about it in another post very soon! I made these chocolatey desserts in time for Christmas too! You can check them out below. Fully Loaded Rocky Road Brownies – Fudgy Chocolate Brownie topped with Chocolate ganache mixhed with all the Rocky Road Candies! Intense Dark Chocolate Rum Balls – {or Rum Truffles} These are amazing! Don’t take my word for it. Intense bitter sweet chocolate with a nice boozy Rum kick! Perfect to give as gifts, ONLY if you can bear to part with them.
