Mango-Coconut Bread Pudding

Recipe by Orin Wikified by Drimble Wedge

Mmmm, bread pudding.

This past 4th of July I had a rather large event at my house, afterwards I was left with an enormous pile of breadstuffs. I don't like to waste food generally, so after I pawned off the hotdog/hamburger buns to other friends who were also going to be having BBQ's and whatnot and froze a good chunk of them. Still, I was left with lots of bread... what else to do but make bread pudding! Alternately, all of the following can be found on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orin/sets/72157600680889922/

Gather your ingredients!

• 3 table spoons of butter
• 1/3 of a cup of confectioners sugar
• 1/2 cup of brown sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 cans of coconut milk
• 1/2 small can of sweetened condensed milk
• 3+ teaspoons of cinnamon, to taste
• 1.5 cups of shredded coconut
• 1 small bag of mixed dried tropical fruit (mango, pineapple, etc.)
• A lot of bread - I used about a dozen plain white hot dog buns.

Grease your 9x13 pan with butter, pretty self explanatory.

While you're doing this, pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees (f)

Dust the inside of the cake pan with powdered sugar Take your just greased pan, dump some of the powdered sugar in it, tilt, shake, tap and coerce the sugar to stick to the butter.

In a separate bowl...

Combine in this bowl, two cans of coconut milk, half a can of sweetened condensed milk, four whole eggs and the yolk from a fifth egg. Whisk to combine, whisk in the cinnamon.

Optional fruity: Add some dried tropical fruit chunks, I just grabbed these at the store... I ended up using 2/3 of the fruit in with the bread, reserving 1/3 of it later to make a sauce.

Add 1.5 cups of coconut, or to taste if you like less/more. (Isn't this easy?)

I wanted a more pronounced Mango flavor, thinking that the dried fruit wasn't gonna help so much... I added booze flavored like mango. This is optional, but I think it helped. 2oz were added.

I took my dozen or so hotdog buns and broke them up into manageable pieces. The buns were fresh and not stale at all, lending a creamier quality to the pudding, stale bread would work great as well, if not better.

WASH YOUR HANDS FIRST, if you hadn't already...

And then get them dirty again. Fold the liquid mixture and bread chunks together to combine, but don't use any tools as you want to preserve as much of the texture and shape of the bread as possible.

Remember that buttered and sugared pan we prepared earlier? Put the big glop of gooey sweet bread into that.

Optional: Well no, not really. Don't skip this part.

Add about another 1/3 of a cup of shredded coconut onto the surface of your bread pudding, spreading evenly. Cover this with a dusting of brown sugar, it took about 1/2 of a cup of brown sugar to get a nice even coating.

Throw it in the oven, making sure to cook it on a cookie sheet to protect the bottom from overcooking. Put a piece of foil over to top to keep that from overbrowning too, remove it after about 35 minutes. Then continue cooking after removing the foil shield for another 30-40 minutes until the crust is golden brown on top and the texture bounces back when you touch it gently.

Straight from the oven...

Perfect Crust!

While the pudding had been cooking...

I took that extra 1/3 of a bag of dried fruit, 1/2 can of sweetened condensed milk and another half can of milk, combined together and simmered to make a sauce. I pureed this in a blender, creating a thick fruity, creamy sauce...

Hope you enjoy it! I'm a lush so I flavored it with a bit of Gran Marnier too.