Chocolate Orange Bread and Butter Pudding

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Layers of soft bread cooked in a silky, smooth delicious custard loaded with dark chocolate and orange. With a crispy surface, a soft custardy under-layer, served hot with ice cream, this luscious dessert has a range of textures and flavours to excite your tastebuds.

Do you have some hot cross buns left after Easter, or bread or brioche which are past their best? Don’t throw them away – use them to make this fabulous Chocolate Orange Bread and Butter Pudding. I used a couple of Hot Cross Buns with chocolate chunks rather than dried fruit, but either would work. Charlotte made this with Brioche rolls and you could also replace the buns with an equivalent quantity of plain bread.

Whatever you choose to use, this traditional dessert, with a chocolate and orange twist, is a wonderful way to finish a meal. Extremely quick to put together, using mostly store cupboard ingredients, you just need to remember to make it at least 1 hour, or up to 48 hours, before you want to cook it.

How to make Chocolate Orange Bread and Butter Pudding

Collect all your ingredients together:

• bread/brioche/stale hot cross buns
• dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
• unsalted butter
• milk
• double/heavy cream
• soft brown sugar or caster sugar
• grated orange zest
• vanilla extract
• large egg
• fine salt

Prepare the pudding and leave to soak:

1. Slice the bread into slices, around 1 cm thick and roughly 7cm x 4cm in size.
2. Next, in a microwave safe measuring jug, measure out the chocolate, butter, milk and add the double cream. Blitz in the microwave until melted. Give it 1 minute, stir, and leave for a few minutes to see if it all melts. If not, blitz again in 15 second increments.
3. Stir in the sugar, orange zest, vanilla and salt and then whisk in the egg.
4. Pour ⅓ of the chocolate custard into the base of a well buttered baking dish and cover with ½ of the bread slices. Pour over another ⅓ of the custard.
5. Top with the remaining bread and the final ⅓ of the custard.
6. Cover with cling film and leave for at least one hour or up to 48 hours in the fridge, for the bread to absorb the custard before cooking.
7. Remove the cling film and bake in the centre of a pre-heated oven, for about 30 – 40 minutes or until the bread slices on the top of the pudding are crispy and the custard mixture has just set. You will know it is cooked when the centre rises in a slight dome shape and feels firm, yet wobbly, to the touch.
8. Sieve over some icing sugar and serve hot or warm, either as is, with ice cream, cream or even some custard.

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