The Perfect Holiday Dessert
Yes, it’s the perfect holiday dessert, but let’s face it… I’ve eaten this stuff for multiple breakfasts, too. Choose your own adventure.
Here’s the recipe first, and if you’d like to hear my specific thoughts on how it came about and why I love the book Pastry Love so much, scroll to the bottom. We’re turning the recipe blog world on its head! Recipe first!
Pumpkin Custard Croissant Bread Pudding
aka The Perfect Holiday Dessert
Adapted from Pastry Love by Joanne Chang
WHAT IT IS
It’s bread pudding made with a beautiful pumpkin custard and croissants. Not soggy, not dry, not anything but amazing. It tastes like what you think November and December should taste like.
THE BASICS
You cook down some canned pumpkin and then whisk in a bunch of stuff. Pour that onto six torn up croissants, and let it soak in the fridge overnight. Then you gently stir in toasted pecans and brown sugar, top with a little more brown sugar, and then bake it. Done.
INGREDIENTS
one 15-oz can of pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie mix, you guys… straight up pumpkin)
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg (the freshly grated is fantastic, but if you only have what’s in the jar, don’t let that stop you, just use half as much)
1/2 tsp kosher salt (if you have to use table salt, be a little shy of 1/2 tsp)
large pinch of ground cloves
2/3 cup or 7-oz of sweetened condensed milk (most cans are 14 oz)
5-oz can of evaporated milk
6 large eggs at room temperature (just pull them out the morning you’re baking… it won’t hurt them to sit on the counter all day)
2 1/2 cups half-and-half (FULL FAT, PLEASE, DON’T PLAY)
1 tsp vanilla extract
6 croissants (stale is better, so buy them a few days ahead of time or toast them in a low oven to dry them out a bit)
1 cup chopped pecans
3/4 cup brown sugar (light or dark work great)
vanilla ice cream or whipped cream for maximum serving magnificence
HOW TO DO IT
These first two steps you can do up to two days in advance. Cook the canned pumpkin in a small saucepan over medium-low heat for about 15 minutes. Stir it with a wooden spoon or spatula every couple of minutes so it doesn’t burn or stick. After about 15 minutes, the pumpkin should look a little darker and a little thicker. Nothing crazy. Don’t overthink it.
Take the pumpkin off the heat, and whisk in the spices and salt. Then whisk in the sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk. Doing the spices first just ensures they are incorporated more evenly before they might clump up in the milk. If you’re doing this in advance, just put the pumpkin mixture in a container in the fridge until you need it.
Do the next few steps the day before you need the dessert (or blissfully decadent breakfast). In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs until they’re pretty much one color, kind of like you’re making scrambled eggs. Then slowly (for the sake of your sweater and so the eggs don’t freak out) whisk in the half-and-half and vanilla. Gently whisk the pumpkin mixture into that. Congratulations, the hard part is over. (And if you’re paying attention, it was, like, super not hard. You can bake beautiful things let’s keep going.)
Get a 9x13 baking dish to bake this puppy in. It needs to be a baking dish, not a baking sheet. Bread pudding is what it is because of those high sides, so choose a pan with high sides. Butter or use cooking spray to coat the entire pan. Tear the croissant into large pieces, about 1-2 inches across, and scatter them in the pan. Pour the entire pumpkin-egg mixture over the croissants. Use a spatula to gently mix or push down the bread so that all of it gets a custard bath. If a few pieces are sticking out, it’s not a huge deal, but try and make sure as much is submerged as can be. Now cover it with plastic, and stick it in the fridge overnight.
This is the day of! Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F, and immediately grab those pecans. We’re going to toast them, and I find that doing that in the oven while it’s preheating is the best move. Burned nuts are no fun. Dump the nuts on a sheet pan lined with a little foil or parchment paper (just so you don’t have to wash another dish) and pop them in the oven. Check them after three minutes and again every minute after that. Mine were perfect at five minutes just before my oven hit 350. Because we’re using chopped nuts, they take way less time.
Now take the bread pudding out of the fridge and remove the plastic. Notice how the custard soaked into the bread. Well, I find it fun to look at, but I’m not the boss of you I guess. Take 1/2 cup of the 3/4 cup of brown sugar and sprinkle it over the top along with the pecans. Use a spatula to gently mix those in. Just a couple of turns of the spatula are perfectly fine. It’s nice to find pockets of sugar, so no need to mix it like crazy.
Sprinkle the final 1/4 cup of brown sugar over the top, and pop the pan in the oven. It’ll bake for an hour, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes. Check it after an hour, and if a knife comes out of the middle without any custard on it, you’re all set.
It’s best to let the bread pudding cool a bit and set up on a cooling rack before serving. If you plan on having it out for a couple of hours like I had to, cover it with foil after about twenty minutes to keep the heat locked in a bit. It’s such a delight warm.
Serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, but I’ve eaten plenty of naked pieces and they’re still perfect.
Now, for the commentary.
Joanne Chang is one of my favorite pastry chefs around. She’s the owner of multiple locations of a bakery called Flour in the Boston area and a personal baking hero of mine.
Her new book, Pastry Love, is a wonder, and this pumpkin custard bread pudding situation is the first thing I baked out of it and was easily a home run if not a grand slam.
Quick note before we continue: I got her book for free. Free cookbooks are one of my favorite things about this job truth be told. But also truth be told, I’m not sharing this recipe or talking about the book because I’m obligated to. If they hadn’t sent me the book, I would’ve bought it myself and would’ve said all the exact same words. I already own the original Flour cookbook and love it, so owning Pastry Love was inevitable. Just so you know. The Flour people don’t even know I’m saying this. Shall we carry on?
So last weekend, I was tasked with providing a festive dessert for close to thirty people, but because of logistics, the dessert had to be something I could make ahead and could also sit around for an hour or two without anyone getting food poisoning.
Sure, this could be a great place for cookies, but I wanted the dessert to feel cozy and happy and homey. This fit the bill perfectly.
For a little less than thirty people, I doubled this recipe and baked it in two pans. We needed two pans but not by much. Also, everyone had just gorged on Chipotle catering, which could’ve had something to do with portion sizes. But I’d always rather have too much dessert than too little. I also don’t know how many people took a smaller portion or skipped it all together because the second pan was hidden under foil on the back of the table. That’s on me. We’ll never know. All that said, the recipe doubles beautifully.
If you need something to feed a crowd that feels special yet homey and requires very little effort from you, especially on the day of eating it, you can’t find anything more perfect than this recipe. Joanne uses white bread instead of croissants (coward) and light brown sugar instead of dark. Frankly, I usually do, too, but I was shockingly out of light brown sugar, so dark it was. And it was great.
I hope you make this and fall in love with baking just a little bit more. Very low risk, almost the same low effort, and an absolutely delicious reward. Give it a try.
And if you’re a baker, Pastry Love might be my favorite dessert cookbook out there right now. It’s not a book of quick fixes or shortcuts. It’s a book that honors the beauty that is pastry and baking, even the stuff that takes time, and does those things with excellence and absolute love. It’s a treasure.
P.S. All of the links to Pastry Love are Amazon affiliate links.
