Croissant Bread Pudding

Croissant Bread Pudding is a fantastic dessert recipe for the colder months. It’s the sophisticated cousin of regular bread pudding that is typically made with egg bread, brioche, or panettone bread.

It’s lighter, less filling and the flakey crunchy croissants on top make it utterly sublime!

Why You’ll Love This:

Bread pudding is a wonderful dessert idea for holiday entertaining because you can prepare it in advance, and then as soon as you sit down to dinner you can pop it in the oven to bake!

Ingredients

• Croissants You’ll need about 7-8 croissants for this recipe. No need to spring for the expensive ones at the local French bakery! Grocery store variety, or Costco works fine.
• Heavy Cream will give your bread pudding structure, so don’t leave it out in favor of more milk, your bread pudding will be too limp.
• Milk to balance out the heavy cream, otherwise it will lose its lightness and become too dense. Or instead of heavy cream and milk, you could use use 4 cups of Half & Half.
• Sugar I don’t use too much sugar in this recipe, since there will be ice cream and caramel sauce. Just enough to sweeten the base and bring out its flavor.
• Vanilla Extract I love the combination of vanilla and orange, but you could swap out the vanilla for other extracts like Rum Extract or Almond Extract too. If going with Almond extract, consider swapping the raisins for dried cherries and skip the orange zest.
• Orange Zest and Juice will really freshen up the bread pudding and makes it less rich. It’s such a delicious flavor combination for the holidays!
• Raisins will be soaked in the orange juice to plump them up and give them flavor. You could also skip the orange juice and flavor them in 2 tablespoons of rum or bourbon which would be great too! If you are not a fan of raisins use good quality dark chocolate chips. My favorites are the Nestle Toll house Dark Chocolate Morsels. They are fantastic with the orange zest!
• Butter you will need to grease the pan (the egg custard can get sticky!) and for the caramel sauce.
• Powdered Sugar for garnishing. The bread pudding looks really pretty and wintery when dusted with powdered sugar after it’s baked.
• Good Quality Vanilla Ice Cream folks, this would be the tine to spring for the Haagen-Dazs.

Instructions

• Croissant bread pudding works best when the croissants are dried out in the oven first.
• Tear them into bite-sized pieces and place them on a sheet pan at 375F for about 5-8 minutes.
• They should be crispy and fragrant.

Watch My Video Demo Below

Soaking the Raisins

• Before placing the raisins in the skillet with the croissants, be sure to soak them in the orange juice for 5-8 minutes.
• This will plump them up and give your bread pudding a wonderful flavor.
• Be sure to drain the raisins of the orange juice, before placing them in the skillet. Otherwise, the excess liquid will dilute the bread pudding’s custard and make it too runny.

Plating

• Serve the bread oven-to-table, dusted with powdered sugar.
• This is a casual dessert so you can literally just spoon it out with a serving spoon.
• Top it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and drizzle the homemade caramel sauce over the pudding and ice cream.

Storage

• Place any leftovers in a resealable container and keep them refrigerated.
• To reheat, place in an oven-safe dish or place it back into the skillet and reheat at 350F for about 15 minutes or until warmed through.
• You can also freeze the bread pudding by placing it in a resealable, freezer-safe container for up to 1 month. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator and then reheat using the same instructions above.