Caramel Creme Bread Pudding

Recipe

There's a lot of hype regarding the end of the world this Saturday, or Judgement Day (interestingly enough, it's spelled wrong on a lot of the websites I visited while looking into this insane prophecy) so I decided to make one of the fattiest, most calorific deserts I could find-- the bread pudding I was going to make last weekend. With 2 cups of heavy cream and 7 whole eggs, this could kill you before Saturday.

The recipe is kind of misleading. It's called Caramel Creme Bread Pudding but I can't figure out where the caramel is. Am I missing something here? I made a few minor changes but nothing too big. I started with the sugar in the bottom of the pan. The recipe calls for dark brown sugar but I only had light brown sugar. I also started with the Splenda brown sugar mix, which was darker in color but I wasn't sure of the ratio of regular brown sugar to Splenda. Plus, this is supposed to be a calorie filled dish and Splenda is not the way to accomplish that.

I packed the sugar into the bottom of an 8x8" pan:

You can kind of see where I left some of the Splenda in by accident. I wasn't concerned with it having an effect and it didn't. Next I cut up the bread into half-inch cubes and removed the crusts. Remember my pretty Challah bread? Well this is how it turned out:

I love it! It turned out so wonderful. So after the bread was cubed, I put it on top of the brown sugar:

It kind of looks like I'm making stuffing for Thanksgiving. Next I mixed the wet ingredients for the custard. Two cups of heavy cream is a heart attack waiting to happen and as someone who is into healthy eating, this was a hard one to put together but knowing it would be split between a lot of people made me feel better.

I put the 7 eggs in (what's with all of these odd numbers lately? ... grrrr!) and I used skim milk since I didn't have any whole milk on hand. The recipe also said to use a sieve but I didn't have one of those so I just poured it over the bread cubes:

I put the pan in the roaster and I let the mix sit for 30 minutes. About half way through I pressed the bread down with a spoon to make sure it was covered all over.

I put the pan in the oven at 350F and set the timer for 15 minutes. After every 15 minutes the recipe said to put ice cubes in the tray to prevent the water from boiling. I actually had to keep track of how many times I put ice cubes in, a testament to how old I am getting! After 45 minutes I had to take the pan out and empty some of the water out to make room for more ice cubes. Finally, after an hour and fifteen minutes, the bread pudding was ready to come out and Ta-Da!

I let it cool overnight and brought it into work. When we first cut into it, there was a lot of water in the bottom, which I don't understand but I drained it and it was fine. It sure was yummy when I tried it and everyone else seemed to enjoy it too. It was especially good warmed up in the microwave since it's supposed to be served warm. If I made this again, I'd probably add a little bit of cinnamon just to bring out a little more flavor. In the end though I think it turned out pretty good!