Croissant Bread Pudding

Croissants are one of my all time favorite foods. I could eat one every day and be a happy, happy girl. So when a friend of mine sent me a picture of this on twitter I knew I had to try it. 

She used the original recipe found here at the Stone Soup blog. There's even a handy video you can watch!

I don't have a loaf pan, so I just used a glass casserole dish and watched it closer to the end of baking. The original recipe also calls for dark chocolate and that happened to be all I had in my pantry at the time. I used 72% I think? Anyway, it was too dark for me but I'm not a huge fan of dark chocolate to begin with. I ended up sprinkling some powdered sugar on top to help balance out the bitterness of the chocolate. Next time I'd love to try this with Nutella instead. 

Anyway, onto the recipe! You can start with any croissants, but I highly recommend the frozen ones from Trader Joes. If you love croissants you need to go pick up a box. There are 8 in a box and they look itty bitty, but you set them out to rise overnight and they triple in size. If you use those for this, overcook them just a bit so they're nice and crispy. I didn't do that and it made them a bit hard to work with when cutting them.

The original recipe calls for 3 large croissants sliced up into rounds. I ate one of the 8 (I couldn't resist!) and then sliced the rest up minus a few pieces that ended up so mangled they were fed to the dogs. 

Let the croissant pieces soak in the cream/sugar/egg mixture in a large bowl for a few minutes to soak up the custard, then throw them in your baking dish and that's it! Easiest recipe ever. 

Ingredients:

-Croissants (3 large, or 6-7 smaller ones)

-2.5 cups whipping cream

-1/2 C sugar

-3 eggs

-handful of dark chocolate broken into chunks (or use chocolate of your choice!)

Preheat oven to 350. Slice croissants into rounds. Combine eggs, sugar and cream in large bowl. Add croissants and let soak for a few minutes. Layer half of the croissants in baking dish, add chocolate on top and then layer remaining croissants. Pour some of the remaining custard on top. Bake 40-50 minutes (adjust depending on what size dish you bake it in!) or until no liquid custard comes out when you press on the top. 

In the original recipe they let it cool and removed it from the loaf pan to slice & serve it so she lined it with parchment paper. I served mine in the baking dish and served it warm with whipped cream. It's really up to you!