Banana brioche bread and butter pudding

I love aliteration. But onto more important topics.

My favourite episode of overeating - there have been so many I can narrow down a "favourite" - was at the Melbourne meateaters institution Vlado's. Meat on meat on meat. And a side salad. By the time dessert rolled around (strawberry crepes) I was actually nearly crying. I had, as Joey Tribiani would call it, the meat sweats.

I was at the stage in my life where I felt it would be rude to leave food on my plate. I'm over it now (mostly). Growing up, we were the family that couldn't leave the table until our meals were finished. On the positive side it taught us to sample different foods and be a little adventurous.


Remember when we backed brioche and I told you it was the most indulgent "bread" out there? A half and half version of cake and bread, it's packed full of butter and eggs, but kneaded into submission.  It's pretty excessive. And then I went and painted it with more butter and baked it in custard.

I wanted to test how brioche fared thawing from frozen (it worked a treat) and found I had half a small loaf left over. What to do? I'd done the pate and was out of jam. The nights were cold (still are) and thought of the old favourite, bread and butter pudding.

This pudding often has raisins or other dried fruit added to the mix. I love currants, but have OD'ed on them recently. We had a banana going funky in the fruit bowl and I knew it would make for a cracking combination.

This takes around 1 hour 15 minutes to prepare. 1 hour of that time is soaking - you can put your feet up, cruise Pinterest and sip on your pina colada. If you can stir some liquid and butter some bread, you can make this dessert.

I know I say this a fair bit, but you don't need big servings of this. I can vouch for the richness of this dish - I'm sitting here, squirming uncomfortably because of my "eyes-bigger-than-belly" serving after a dinner of leftover ragu. Classic Bennetto.

Ingredients

8 thin slices brioche
50g butter
1 banana
3 eggs
200ml milk
200ml cream
60g sugar
2 tbsp brandy
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

Preheat oven to 180ºC. Grease three ramekins with butter.

Butter brioche on both sides and cut to fit the height of your dish. Slice the banana thinly on the diagonal. Place the brioche slices in the ramekins, and place a couple of slices of banana between each slice.

In a jug whisk together the eggs, milk, cream, sugar, brandy and nutmeg.  Pour gently over the brioche in the ramekins until just covered. It's OK if little bits peak out the top of the custard - they'll be nice and crusty by the end. Leave to soak for at least 1 hour.

Bake for around 15 minutes, or until the liquid is just set. I found one took a couple of minutes longer, but do keep an eye one them so they don't scramble.

Serve with vanilla icecream and some icing sugar dusted over the top.