Bread and butter pudding

Bread and butter pudding is a part of many people's childhood memories.  I don't believe I ever had the pleasure of eating this dessert as a child; I don't recall my mother ever making it.  She didn't tend to make a lot of sweet things for us to have at home though.  Occasionally we were given homemade biscuits or slice for afternoon tea, but rarely did she make dessert for the family unless there were guests coming over.  I believe the first time I tasted bread and butter pudding would have been at a restaurant, where it seemed for a while to gain some popularity on restaurant menus back in the 90s, and still does appear on some.

The recipe I use is the ginger-jam bread and butter pudding from Nigella Bites.  The recipe stipulates brown bread, which is surprisingly good, and you can convince yourself it is healthier that way, but this time I have used white bread as that was what I had to hand.  You can change the ingredients around to suit yourself.  If you don't like the idea of the ginger jam, you can use whatever flavour you like.  I have done this recipe before with apricot jam, and I substituted ground cinnamon for the ground ginger in the topping, and that was delish.  If you don't want to use rum for soaking the sultanas, you could try using juice instead to help them plump up.  I particularly like the crunch the demerara sugar gives to the top.   Keep an eye on it towards the end of the cooking time - my exposed crusts were starting to get too brown, so I did cover the top for the last 5 minutes of cooking, but probably should have covered the top earlier than that.  If they are starting to brown too much and you still have some time to go, maybe cover the top and then remove it for the final 5 minutes so the top will still be crunchy.

You can find the recipe here.