Cadillac Cafe Milk Chocolate Bread Pudding

This is a pretty easy bread pudding.  At least the pudding is easy.  Slicing the bread, buttering it, and toasting it; then arranging in the little cups--well, it's not hard, but it is time-consuming.

I made this once before, but I didn't take any pictures because my baguette was so sturdy that it wouldn't bend even after it was soaked in the chocolate custard.  No chance of getting anything that resembled a rose.  I think I finally just poured everything in a big dish and baked it.  It was unlovely as I recall, but I seem to have erased it from my memory.

Cream and eggs--that's pretty much the entire custard.  It's mostly egg yolks, but also two whole eggs.  When Jim saw me crack an egg and put it in whole, he panicked.  "No!  You forgot to separate the egg!"  I don't need another person panicking, but I recovered enough to tell him that it wasn't a mistake.

Oh, well, of course there's chocolate in the custard.  Otherwise it wouldn't be a chocolate bread pudding.  I was tempted to use darker chocolate, but I decided to follow the recipe.  Next time I'd use at least half dark chocolate.  Milk chocolate tastes too sweet and bland now that I'm used to the good stuff.

And there's not enough color.  I don't know if I'd have had the same reaction if we hadn't just made the chocolate mousse cake, with its rich chocolate taste, so recently.

What?  8 individual souffle cups AND 8 small bowls!  Couldn't I just use the souffle cups and save a step (not to mention a lot of dishes)?  I opted to follow the recipe again, but I do think you could get away with only using the souffle cup.  I'm just trying to save you some work.

This is how they came out of the oven.  You'd have to stretch it some to say these look just like chocolate roses.  But they do have a decorative look, even if they're not as pretty as the picture in the book.  If I were making them again, I'd dust a little confectioners' sugar on them because I was reminded during chocolate mousse cake that powdered sugar and cocoa both hide a multitude of sins. And it's never bad for sins to be hidden away.