vegan baker

I apparently have owned adorable wavy ramekins for several years, but only came to know it tonight. The nice thing about this discovery is that I can halve the bread pudding recipe and not gain fourteen pounds in the next week. (Just seven.)

I tucked the bread chunks neatly into the ramekins. They swelled up like jerks in the oven, causing sugary milk to sizzle over the sides onto the oven floor (and the entire house to smell like burning), but the results are cute. I may have contradicted my previous claim about bread pudding being horrifically unphotogenic.

When the puddings were baking, I chopped up a bar of high cocoa content Valrhona chocolate and topped it with a couple of tablespoons of confectioner’s sugar, two pinches of sea salt and a grind of nutmeg, all in a heat-proof bowl. I got out a little saucepan and in it combined half a cup of creamer, a quarter cup of soymilk, teaspoons of vanilla and bourbon and a quarter teaspoon of almond extract. I brought the soymilk mixture to a simmer and poured it over the chocolate. Then I wisked the whole mess together until it emulsified and put it in the fridge to cool.

Once the sauce was done, I tasted it and hated it. (I hate almond extract in pretty much everything.) I will admit my hate was premature in this case. Weird as it was by itself, once it was soaked into the bread pudding, the combination was killer. Killer. Here is a picture of the rabbit making a funny face in front of the ruins of the pudding, to which I had laid waste.

I am sorry, but it is impossible to photograph bread pudding without producing an image this unappealing. It’s just slimy, gooey, gummy stuff. That’s what makes it good.

I’ve made vegan bread pudding once before. It’s simple enough. You take a pile of cubed, dry bread and you pour a mixture of soymilk, sugar and Christmas-y spices over it. You let everything sit for half an hour until the milk is soaked up and then you bake the mess for about an hour. Poof. Bread pudding.

I want to improve the end result, good as it is. A loose bread pudding is generally baked in a bath (the pan goes in a larger container of simmering water inside the oven to help the eggs set properly), and I want some of that custard quality to shine through. I’ve baked a couple of puddings tonight, one with soymilk and agar flakes and one with soy creamer and a shot of good bourbon. The rest is unchanged.

Results? I liked the consistency of the agar-gelled fluid, but the flakes became little nuggets. When the pudding cooled I had something disconcertingly Jello jiggler-y. As such, agar’s out, though if you want to try it I suggest powder over flakes and a period of boiling pre-bake. The second pudding was something of a revelation. Creamer definitely beat out soymilk for mouthfeel and eggy texture (fat will do that), and the bourbon gave the vanilla flavor a pleasant complexity. This will be my working recipe from now on. I’ll keep testing and update as I go.