Quick & Easy Bread Pudding Recipe - FlavCity w Bobby

Ask anyone who knows me, and they'll tell
you I'm just not a fan of baking. It must have to do with all that measuring and the
exact science of it. You know, I like to cook. I like to embrace my inner artist, my Jackson
Pollock, but there is one dessert I have a soft spot for, and that is bread pudding.
There's just something about that ooey gooey deliciousness, but the cheapskate deep down
in me just can't stand paying $8 for pretty much left-over bread and a custard at a restaurant.
I thought to myself, "How can I embrace my inner, lazy baker?" And boom, I came up with
a recipe for my lazy man's bread pudding.

There's pretty much two ingredients to the
whole thing. First off, you need bread, some left-over
stale ... Day-old bread works great. Hey, what self-respecting Jewish guy doesn't have
a loaf of challah laying around somewhere in the kitchen.

For the second ingredient,
we head to the freezer. Vanilla ice cream. Normally, you have to make a custard when
it comes to bread pudding, and that involves whisking together eggs with milk and cream
and sugar and vanilla, and man, whew, that just makes me tired thinking about it, but
vanilla ice cream has all that hard work done for you because that custard base is the ice
cream itself. Given the fact that vanilla ice cream is the number one flavor in America,
I guarantee you have at least a pint of it in your freezer.
With these two ingredients and a little help from your pantry, you're well on your way.
In the bowl, I have one pint or one pound of vanilla ice cream that I melted in the
microwave.

To that, I'm going to add three cups of one-inch cubed challah bread. I'm
using stale bread. If you have fresh bread only, just after you cube it, throw it into
a 200 degree oven for about 10 minutes until it gets a little dry. You don't want to toast
it into a crouton.

This mixture needs to sit for 30 minutes because that white bread needs
to soak up all that rich vanilla custard moisture and flavor. In the mean-time, we're going
to head over to the pantry because there's a few more ingredients we can add to this
bread pudding that are going to take the flavor and texture over the top.
The pantry is the backbone to any good kitchen, and it has to be stocked at all times. For
me, that means always having chocolate chips and raisins on-hand. I mean, who doesn't like
to pop a handful of these into their pie-hole at some time, and they're going to make a
good addition to our bread pudding.

Now, the raisins will be tough and leathery if you
throw them in as-is, so we need to soak them in some liquid to kind of plump them up. Now,
you could add water, but hey, I don't pass any opportunity to cook with booze, so I saw
some coconut rum in my pantry, and I'm just going to soak it in here while the bread is
doing its work over there. Let's add our half-cup of chocolate chips
to this, and then add the raisins, but make sure to drain the rum first. You can obviously
save it for later so you can shoot it.

Fold it up nicely here. You can dump this into
a baking dish if you have it; just make sure you butter it, but if you're a lazy guy or
a lazy gal, you might not have a baking dish on-hand. Don't worry about it. Grab a ceramic
cereal bowl; the same thing you eat your Cap'n Crunch out of in the morning.

I'm using these
old French onion soup bowls, and just fill them up, and we'll get them in the oven. Don't
pack them down; otherwise they're not going to back evenly. I know this is going to be
a really creamy, smooth dish, so I want some kind of contrasting crunch, so in the bowl
here, I combined about a third of a cup of pecans with a tablespoon of brown sugar.
All I'm going to do is put this on the top, and while it bakes, it's going to get golden
brown and crunchy. It's going to be a great contrasting texture to our dish.

Pop these
guys into a 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes until the top gets golden brown but the middle
still jiggles a little bit. I wanted to find out what other lazy man desserts are out there,
so I recently talked to my buddy, Jeff Mauro, from the Food Network and some other of Chicago's
top chefs to find out. Jeff: We keep cookies frozen. Sometimes I
don't even need to back them.

I just go in, and I eat it like an apple. They're about
this big. You're getting all the secrets out of me. I don't know how ...

Is it just good
for my brand, so to speak, but I eat it like an apple, usually under the cover of darkness
with just the light from the fridge hitting my face, making me ... Accentuating the chins.
I'm that guy, almost breaking a tooth on that. Mindy: I always have cookies in my refrigerator,
a little bit like ... That aren't baked off so that I can take the dough out just like
if you bought it at the store, but it's actually home-made, and I just slice it up and throw
it in the oven.

Bobby: These guys just came out of the oven,
and check out how beautiful and golden brown they are on top. They look absolutely perfect.
Now, you might want to wait about 20 minutes for these to cool down. That is, unless you
want a second degree burn in your mouth. That eggy challah bread has a delicious vanilla
flavor just soaked throughout it, and I love that rich decadent chocolate.

I'm a sucker
for the crunch of the pecans. With a recipe like this, you can spend less time in the
kitchen baking and more time being lazy on the couch binge-watching House of Cards. Zoe,
watch out! For this great recipe, check out flavcity.Com, and if you like this video or
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I'll see you next time, only on Flavor City..