Valentine's Day: Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding

I'm pretty new to the whole Valentine's Day thing. When I was in the restaurant business, it was easily our busiest time of the year. Imagine doing a month's worth of business in a one- or two-day stretch, each table being sat twice a night and served seven courses! It took a week before Valentine's Day to prep for the special menu and it took a week after to recuperate. Besides never being home for Valentine's Day, I was also a zombie. It is still a wonder to me that Ann stuck by me through all that.

This year, I wanted to do something special to surprise her. Because of COVID, going out is not an option. But realistically, because I was in the business and know how stressed restaurants are under the crush of business, I would never go out for Valentine's dinner anyway. Still, I cook dinner every night and so cooking dinner would not really be special. I opted instead to make a special brunch.

Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding

What was different is that for brunch I made something totally out of left field. We don't eat sweets, fruit aside, and our diet is very low in simple carbs. So naturally, I made a Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding because that would be the absolute last thing that she would expect from me. And I made it under Ann's nose. She didn't know anything about it until about 45 minutes into its baking when it started to perfume the house. I served it with blood orange segments on top to help cut the sweetness.

A Jam Bread Pudding

This bread pudding was inspired by my mother's mother. When I would visit my grandmother during college breaks, she would sometimes smear slices of white bread with butter and jam and shingle them in the bottom of a pan. She would then pour a custard over the bread and a few minutes later, a bread pudding would emerge from her oven.

The challah-based savory bread pudding that I made for New Year's Brunch cemented for me that soft breads such as the store-bought white loaf bread that my grandmother used do not make great bread puddings. A good bread pudding needs a hearty bread with a good crust. A lot of the charm of a great bread pudding is the contrast of the soft interior with a crunchy crust, something you do not get from indifferent bread.

I bought a good quality focaccia for this bread pudding. I used focaccia because it is the depth of my pan and so I could expose the focaccia crust through the top of the pudding. Assembling the bread pudding on the QT was something of a challenge. Each time Ann would leave the room, I would do a bit more: slicing the bread, spreading raspberry jam on each slice, chopping a block of chocolate, making the orange-vanilla custard base, putting all the ingredients together, and "hiding" the pudding in plain sight in the back of the refrigerator.

I made a quart of custard base: a quart of 2% milk, a splash of vanilla extract, the zest of one blood orange, five eggs, and a scant half a cup of sugar. Initially, the pudding took about half the custard, the remainder of which I put in the refrigerator and used to top off the pudding before I went to bed the night before. In all, the pudding took about 3-1/2 cups of custard base.

Valentine's morning while Ann was brushing her teeth, I put the pudding in the oven. She had no idea what was going on until it was just about done and started making the house smell great.

Mimosa, Crossword, and Ed-Made Valentine's Day Card

It's our morning ritual to have our coffee along with a crossword puzzle from the Sunday New York Times. I left a Valentine's card on the table where we do our crosswords. I always make Ann a card (having never felt that buying a card from the store expresses anything about me except that I was lazy) and this year was no different.

When Ann was upstairs printing the crossword puzzle, I brought in the bird condo that you see in the photo below as another surprise for her. She had expressed interest in having one (along with explicit instructions: "the center has to be red") some weeks ago and I demurred, having already a very long list of woodworking projects on my list.

As I was working on those other projects, I took time and converted scrap lumber to the bird condo for her. It now adorns our back gate.

Bird Condo Above Our Back Gate

Once the bread pudding came out of the oven, I made us some mimosas and we sat down to splurge for Valentine's brunch. As good as this bread pudding was, I'd rather have had a savory bread pudding. Note to self.