TWD—Apple-Apple Bread Pudding—or not, or Maybe, Hmmm? Chocolate Cobbler, too.

Early last week, I made half the recipe for this week’s pick by Liz (Luh-OVE her!) at Cake...or DEATH?.  Everything went quick smoothly.  I chose a multigrain boule from the bakery for the bread because that’s the kind of bread I like.  I caramelized the apples. (Yum.)  I spread each slice of bread with apple butter.  Followed along with the recipe nicely.  Then, I played Miss Healthy-Pants and made the pudding with skim milk (I still used the heavy cream though).  But for the eggs, which should have been 1 1/2 eggs and 2 1/2 yolks, I decided to just use 3 whole eggs.  That was close enough.  Right?  I dunno.  Other than that I followed the recipe exactly, but what I ended up with was a not-so-pleasant really eggy goop on the bottom with bread and apples floating on the top.  I already don’t care for most custard/eggy type desserts, bread pudding being one of them, but I was optimistic about this one and thought it sounded really good.  ‘Sides, I didn’t want to skip out on Liz’ pick.

For fun and because I thought it sounded good, I made a walnut crumb topping and sprinkled it on the bread pudding about halfway through its bake time. 

It looks good, huh?

Well, I’ve spared you any other pictures of it because it just wasn’t pretty or edible.  I just cannot eat scrambled egg whites with sweet, carmel apples and cinnamon sugar topping.  ;)  I told myself all weekend that I would make 1/4 the recipe sometime with the remaining bread.  But we were having company for desserts Friday night (the day my bread pudding failed) and I decided to turn to chocolate!

I had seen this really yummy looking Chocolate Cobbler at Pioneer Woman’s blog and besides it looking so good, thought it sounded really fast and easy.  I had made homemade vanilla bean ice cream to go with the bread pudding, so it worked perfectly with the chocolate cobbler as well.  What is chocolate cobbler?  It seems to have many names.  Hot Pudding Cake and Chocolate Pudding Cake to name a few.  The chocolate cobbler version is from a recipe submitter to Pioneer Woman’s Tasty Kitchen website.  The dessert was delicious!  The recipe is there on either one of the links here.  Whip it up next time you need a quick, super rich chocolaty dessert in a hurry.  It only has a few basic ingredients that you probably have on hand (It doesn’t even have any eggs!).

This was my first time using real (or fake—hehe) vanilla beans for something.  I used David Lebovitz Philadelphia Style Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from his book, The Perfect Scoop.  It was really good.

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Then, I got this crazy delightful idea today (Monday) to make my own version of apple bread “pudding”.  I toasted a slice of the remaining multigrain bread I had.

Then I spread apple butter on it.

I caramelized some sliced apple and put that on top of the apple butter toast.

Pudding, pudding, hmmm, let’s see.  Aha.  Fat free vanilla yogurt.

After removing the apples from the pan, there was a tablespoon or so of the syrupy caramel.  So I let it caramelize a bit more, then added a touch of cream to it and boom—had a little caramel!

A few walnuts sprinkled on top and this was a GREAT not-so-unhealthy lunch for me!  (Had a little salad a bit later with some salad mix from the farmers’ market.)

Seriously good.  I will be having this again sometime.  Thank you, Liz, I would have never thought about something like this had you not picked the bread pudding for TWD this week.  You can get the bread pudding recipe on Liz’ blog.

And in closing, a completely random picture of Taylor.  He was playing outside, even clear down the street with part of the mop bucket on his head (said it was his cowboy hat).

Ride ‘em, Cowboy. ;)