TWD: Four Star Chocolate Bread Pudding

This week Lauren of Upper East Side Chronicle, now A Baking Blog, chose Four Star Chocolate Bread Pudding and I think that it's definitely worth all four stars! I love bread pudding (minus the raisins, of course) and I love chocolate so this was bound to be a hit with me. I'll admit, I'd looked at the recipe in the book and the picture of the gooey bread pudding and it looked fantastic to me. I know that if I were still in Houston right now I might be less than enthused about bread pudding because, in my mind at least, it's a very comforting winter dessert, but I've had some cool (I call them cold) and wet days recently and they were perfect for this sort of dessert.

I adore my brother and sister. My sister graduated with a degree in political science (she'll tell you it's comparative Russian politics but I'll just call it poli sci) but in her last semester of her senior year she decided that she wanted to be a doctor. So, she moved back to Houston when she was done with school and took all of the pre-reqs for medical school and we lived together quite happily for three years before I moved to D.C. She took ecology one semester and from then on out we had to trap spiders under glasses and release them because they're "good" bugs. I'm NOT an insect lover at all so this didn't sit well with me; she was officially in charge of catch and release for all spiders in the house. I mentioned one day that I'd be so sad if a species of animal went extinct in my lifetime -- I mean, I can't imagine having kids who think that rhinos and tigers are only pretend animals, something akin to dinosaurs -- and she informed me that it would probably happen. Eeek! I haven't done any research on this, nor have I taken the class, nor do I have even remotely the proper background to make this blog my forum to discuss the extinction of a species. I just think that it's cool that there's Endangered Species Chocolate and that's what I used in the bread pudding. I used dark chocolate with hazlenut toffee and it's supremely yummy, though I wish that the toffee and hazlenut flavor had been a little bit more pronounced in the pudding.

I used croissants for the bread in the bread pudding because I think that it's hard to get richer than a croissant. I toasted them first and then they were sort of like shards, which was to be expected. I was a little worried that the croissants didn't have enough structure to hold up the bread pudding and that it would end up mush but it ended up being absolutely fantastic. I made 1/3 of the recipe and that made 4 ramekins of pudding. I didn't really have any of the issues with the custard remaining separate from my bread that some people mentioned in the P&Q this week. My puddings were a lovely amalgamation of bread, custard, and chocolate and they were soooo good. I left out the cherries thinking that they'd be chocolate hazelnut toffee bread puddings but I think next time I'll slip some in. Chocolate and cherries are just a great combination, no?
In case you haven't guessed, I loved these bread puddings! The only thing that I'd change in the future is to maybe add a little bit more chocolate. It was nice and chocolatey out of the oven the first night but after that the chocolate flavor seemed to diminish. Not to worry, I reheated them with extra chocolate chips when I ate the rest of them. They're rich and delicious and when I work out this week I will envision the chocolate bread pudding. Because, seriously people, TWD is some major workout motivation these days!