Easy Hot Cross Bun and Brioche Bread and Butter Pudding

I've been trying to perform a bit of a fridge/freezer genocide this weekend - the term was coined by flatmates a few years back, and featured on our student flat chore roster. Actually, the chore roster was a well incentivised masterpiece - living with three economists can have that effect - whereby if you skipped yours you owed extra money to the flat account, and if it got past the weekly cut-off anyone could undertake the chore and receive the payout (any extra amounts accumulated were periodically distributed between all five of us). It was a great system, and among other things prevented any nasty discoveries of furry half-eaten cans of baked beans three months past their best. Now with just the two of us the dangers aren't so great, since we tend to know what we've bought and/or stashed, but there's still the need to have a bit of a blitz from time to time.

So about an hour ago when Mr Cake was pondering what he could eat, bread and butter pudding seemed like the perfect solution to all the world's problems - among other things emerging from the freezer today was a solitary hot cross bun and the end of a loaf of brioche (which had been languishing ever since I made this). 

It's a rough and ready, super quick to assemble dessert, and works amazingly with pretty much any bread you can lay your hands on. You can jazz it up by adding spices to your taste, or throwing in some fruit - sultanas or chopped dried apricots or whatever you think will taste good. You just rip up the bread, mix everything else together and throw it in a baking dish - that's pretty much all there is to it.

We were pretty pleased with how it turned out - both the hot cross buns and brioche were great, though we slightly preferred the brioche (must be all that glorious butter). Perhaps I should make a habit of keeping brioche in the freezer, and then clean it out with greater regularity, forcing me to make more of this. ;-) That could hardly be a bad thing, could it? Have you found anything delicious and forgotten lurking in your fridge or freezer lately?

Bread and Butter Pudding
Ingredients
2-3 buns or 4-5 slices or equivalent of stale bread
1 3/4 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp cinnamon (or spices to your taste)

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Butter a baking dish. Rip up the bread and place in the baking dish. Mix together the rest of the ingredients and pour over the bread. Push any sticking up bits down to make sure they sop up the liquid and leave for 2-3 minutes to soak in before cooking. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until the custard is set. Enjoy with custard, cream or ice-cream.