Oooh, boy, I have been waiting for autumn to come to share this recipe! It is the perfect fall treat! It’s warm and comfy and spicy and soooo satisfying!  I know it kind of looks like some kind of fried chicken with gravy, but it’s actually a dessert!  It’s Buttery Lemon Bread Pudding with the most delicious sauce ever. I don’t always even save it for a treat, sometimes we have it for breakfast! Chockfull of goodness, it has lots of healthful fat, protein, and carbs from healthful sourdough bread, which makes the grain more digestible.

This is the best thing to serve on a gray, drizzly fall morning when the family doesn’t want to get going. I feel more motivated to get out of bed when I think about the lovely, spicy smells that come wafting out of the oven when it’s baking. It does take a long time to bake, sometimes up to an hour,  however, so plan accordingly.  As a bonus, It also uses up all of your leftover stale bread.

I remember eating a white bread version of this at my baby sister’s home two years ago, when we had a Girls’ Night Out involving the LDS General Women’s meeting. My sister’s wonderful husband made it. I felt like swooning after eating one bite, it was so amazing!

So I was delighted to find out how to make this recipe with whole wheat sourdough bread to make it  whole-foodsy. I’ve been making bread out of natural yeast for years now, with a recipe from The Art of Baking With Natural Yeast that I modified to work with my breadmachine. I like to toss any heels from the loaf or pieces that get toasted and then not eaten, into a breadbox in my cupboard, after I tear up the pieces. I leave the lid off the container so that the bread dries out. After the breadbox is full, it’s time to make bread pudding. Yum! You never have to throw out any old bread pieces again!

(Note: lately my old pieces of bread have been turning moldy. This didn’t use to happen. Supposedly naturally-yeasted/sourdough bread is not supposed to go moldy as fast as regular homemade bread, but that’s not holding true around here.  I am not sure why it’s happening now, but I will be throwing the torn up pieces of bread into a ziploc bag in the freezer on from now. Also, the above picture looks crumbly because I used stale bread chunks pulverized in the blender. I like to store bread crumbs in the freezer and use for various recipes. I used old torn up pieces of bread for the bottom layer, and ran out, but I still had lots of bread crumbs, so I used those.)

So here’s the recipe:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Butter an 8 x8 baking dish, or a circular dish like the one in the picture. Then fill it up with torn up pieces of stale sourdough bread. Make sure the bread chunks are submerged in the liquid so they will be soft and not rock hard after baking. If you have a big family, like more than 6 people, you might want to use a 9×13 dish and double all the ingredients listed below.

Mix together the following:

3 eggs

3 c milk

1/4 c sucanat (you can buy sucanat from Amazon or azurestandard.com. Sucanat is whole brown sugar with all of the vitamins and minerals from the sugar cane intact.)

1 T vanilla extract

2-10 drops of lemon essential oil, depending on how lemony you want your pudding

2 T melted butter

1/2 t cinnamon

1/2 t nutmeg if you love nutmeg like I do!

Pour this mixture on top of the stale bread/breadcrumbs mixture and then pop into the oven. Bake for 45 minutes or until a knife inserted comes out clean. It might take an hour or more, especially if you double the recipe.

While the pudding is baking, don’t relax yet. It’s time to make the sauce!

Sauce

Mix the following ingredients and cook on medium heat until bubbly.

1/2 c cream, preferably raw,  or milk (preferably raw) if you are out of cream

1/2 – 3/4 c sucanat, on the higher end if you have a sweet tooth

1 t vanilla

1/c butter

2 to 10 drops of lemon essential oil, or orange, to taste

Smother your bread pudding with the sauce and enjoy every mouthful! I feel so nourished whenever I eat this! Since reading the Trim Healthy Mama book I have been eating more carbs and my symptoms of hormonal stress are going away. This is a healthful dessert that will mildly raise your blood sugar level, not spike it, so enjoy if you are needing some carbs right now! It’s definitely not THM approved, as it uses sucanat.

P.S. If you have leftover oatmeal, you can sneak some oatmeal into this, if your family is not super sensitive to detecting leftover oatmeal like my kids are.