Bread and Butter Pudding
Buttered bread layered with raisins, soaked in vanilla custard and baked until the peaks are crisp and the middle is barely set.
Photograph credit: Croissant Bread & Butter Pudding - Clifton Road Coffee 2025-10-27 by Andy Li · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Where This Goes Wrong
Day-old bread, not fresh. Fresh bread turns to paste.
The 30-minute soak is the difference between pudding and bread in custard.
Leave the top points dry so they crisp instead of steaming.
Photograph credit: Croissant Bread & Butter Pudding - Clifton Road Coffee 2026-04-02 by Andy Li · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
How to Make Bread and Butter Pudding
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Soak the raisins in the brandy for 20 minutes.
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Butter the bread on one side and cut each slice into triangles. Butter a 2 litre baking dish.
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Heat the milk, cream and vanilla until steaming, then take off the heat and leave 10 minutes to infuse.
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Whisk the eggs, yolks, caster sugar, salt and lemon zest, then pour the warm milk in slowly, whisking. Strain.
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Layer half the bread buttered side up in the dish, scatter the soaked raisins over, then arrange the rest of the bread on top, overlapping so the points stand proud.
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Pour the custard over and press the bread down gently. Leave 30 minutes for it to soak in.
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Scatter with demerara and grate nutmeg over the top.
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Sit the dish in a roasting tin, pour boiling water halfway up the sides, and bake at 160°C / 320°F fan for 40 to 45 minutes.
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It is ready when the middle has a slight wobble and the peaks are dark gold. Rest 10 minutes before serving.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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Why the Method Works
The soak is the recipe: thirty minutes lets the custard get into the crumb so the pudding sets as one thing rather than as bread sitting in scrambled egg. Leaving the top layer proud of the custard is what gives you the crisp, almost caramelised peaks that make the dish worth eating.
Leftovers, Reheating and Keeping
Refrigerate up to 3 days and reheat covered at 160°C / 320°F fan for 15 minutes. Freezes 1 month.
Good With
- Pouring cream or vanilla ice cream
- A glass of dessert wine
- Strong tea
Questions and Answers
How long does Bread and Butter Pudding take to make?
20 minutes of preparation and 45 minutes of cooking, plus 50 minutes of soaking, so allow 1 hour 55 minutes from start to finish. The recipe serves 6.
Nutrition per Serving
Per serving, an approximate calculation from the ingredient list. Treat it as a rough guide: where a line offers a choice of foods, only one of them is counted; an ingredient listed without an amount is not counted, so the figures run low; part of the energy comes from foods, or weights per item, with no recorded source. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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