First Thursday: Bread pudding with whiskey sauce

Last night I participated once again in First Thursday over at Thursday Night Smackdown. This month's theme was romantic cliches. In other words - Valentine's dessert. Since First Thursday is all about testing the mettle of your cookbooks, I decided to grab a cookbook that's spine has never been cracked. I also decided since this was supposed be Valentine's-ish, I'd let me husband choose which dessert in the book I'd make. Then I'd make it as organic as possible.

A few months before Hurricane Katrina hit, my husband and I had gone to New Orleans. To tell you the truth, it's not a place I'm in a hurry to get back to. Maybe it was the creepy mannequin heads in our B&B room that had dusty wigs on them. But I did like the food. So I bought a New Orleans cookbook before we left, but I've never once used it. Until last night.

My husband chose bread pudding with whiskey sauce from The Best of New Orleans: A Cookbook for me to make. It wasn't too difficult to organic it up - bread, cream, eggs, butter, sugar - all easy to get organically.

The whiskey sauce was awesome. The bread pudding was just okay. But pouring the whiskey sauce all over the bread pudding made it very edible. I could have poured that whiskey sauce over my infamous chili cornbread pie from Susan Powter's Stop the Insanity cookbook that I made back in 1995 that still haunts my husband and me to this day, and it would have made it good (the dog wouldn't even eat the chili cornbread pie and looked up at us as if to ask if we hated her when we tried to feed it to her).

The bread pudding was just bland. And since the recipe said that the pudding could be eaten with or without the sauce (kids had to eat it without - the whiskey does not burn off), I would think that the pudding would have been stand alone good.

But this First Thursday was not a complete loss because now I know about whiskey sauce. I think it would be good on ice cream or drizzled over apples or just out of the pan with a spoon. It would be worth it to find a different bread pudding recipe and pair it with this sauce.