Hot Cross Bun Bread and Butter Pudding

One of my favourite food writers, Xanthe Clay, wrote a wonderful article in April's Delicious Magazine about using perfect ingredients.  You may be surprised to hear that she champions older ingredients and left-overs, arguing that over-ripe fruit has better flavour than fresh, and a good cook can make something good out of anything.   I so agree!  My boys tease me for using up leftovers (that old joke: "My mum fed us on leftovers for 20 years;  the original meal was never traced" is brought out regularly at home), but they are surely the best source of culinary ingenuity, stopping short of food poisoning...   With this view in mind, when I discovered some home made hot cross buns lurking in an overlooked tin, I decided to test the boundaries and turn them into a bread and butter pudding.  Reader, they were delicious!    You need to make more custard than you would for fresher bread or brioche, as the buns really needed to hoover up lots of juice - as you can see below -  but they tasted fantastic.

Hot Cross Bun  Bread and Butter Pudding

Hot Cross Bun and Butter Pudding  

4 hot cross buns

butter

2 eggs

1oz/25g sugar

½ pint milk

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp caster sugar

Oven 180 deg C

Cut the buns in half and butter them.   Reassemble and then cut again, to allow the custard to soak up into each bun.   Arrange in a buttered oven proof dish.  In a jug, beat up the eggs, sugar and milk, and pour it over the buns.  Allow to soak for about 10 minutes or more – if the buns are very stale, they will take up a lot of the mixture.   If it has all vanished and you like a good proportion of custard to bun, make up a half quantity and repeat the exercise.

Dust with the cinnamon and caster sugar and bung into the oven.   It takes about 15- 20 minutes to cook. 

Serve with cream or yoghurt.