Coconut Rum Bread Pudding

This pudding reminds me of a trip to the Bahamas, where my family and I ate the richest coconut bread, fresh from a bakery in Nassau, then combined it with the only other ingredients we had in the house to create this easy-going, tropical dessert.

To start, I grabbed the three most important ingredients for the pudding: bread, coconut milk, and coconut rum. With this pudding, unlike other recipes, it's more than fine to experiment with ingredients, and amounts. This is why a bread pudding is so fun! I adapted a common bread pudding recipe to this tropical variation, and included cinnamon and vanilla, to balance out the added coconut flavor.

Now a little history about how bread pudding came to be: In the olden days, when the loaf of bread in the kitchen got stale, cooks would take the hard stale loaf, and soak it in eggs and cream to reuse the old bread, creating this creamy pudding dish.

To replicate this method, you take take your fresh loaf of bread and cut into generous slices of bread, and toast in in the oven at 200 degrees, for about 10 minutes.

Then, take the bread out of the oven, and slather it with butter, then cube it into one inch pieces.

You can cut the crust off the toast if you want a smoother texture, or leave them on, like i did.

Meanwhile, mix the liquid part of the pudding, which is eggs, coconut milk, sugar, cinnamon, coconut rum, and salt. Whisk it until smooth, then combine the bread cubes into the pudding, and once that is throughly coated, add dried baking coconut to the pudding, then gently transfer into a greased baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees until the pudding is set, about 30 minutes- however if you use a different pan the baking time can vary greatly.

So I wasn't tempted to eat it all myself (and I was!), I brought it to school to share with some friends. They approved, and their only suggestions? Double the recipe :)