It’s just staring at me.

I hate wasting food. There’s nothing worse to me than finding expired items in my fridge or a half used loaf of now stale bread on my counter and having to toss it. All week this almost full package of hamburger buns has been staring at me and whispering things like, “you better not waste me…”

But what on earth am I going to do with a package of hamburger buns when I have no intention of making hamburgers soon? Hope I run into some hungry ducks?

I have used hamburger buns as mini pizza crusts before but I wanted to make something a little more sophisticated and really transform them into something new! That’s when I got inspired to make a bread pudding – it just so happens to be one of Bobby’s favorite desserts, so brownie points for me included. Plain bread pudding is just not my favorite though, so I started digging around the pantry and fridge looking for something to make my potential bread pudding really fabulous. And then I saw them.

Last week was our three year wedding anniversary and as a special treat I made chocolate dipped strawberries. They were so good, but neither one of us ate more than two or three…ok, I lied. Bobby ate two or three and I ate like ten, but who’s counting?? We still had a gallon sized ziplock bag full of chocolate dipped strawberries that were calling my name. Rather than binge eat the whole bag, I opted for the higher road. What could be better than chocolate dipped strawberry bread pudding?!

I got out my favorite bread pudding recipe, which I will share with you, plus the chocolate strawberries, and got to work.

Introducing Janice’s Chocolate Dipped Strawberry Bread Pudding:

Ingredients:

• leftover chocolate dipped strawberries (I used roughly 12 large strawberries)
• 2 Eggs, slightly beaten
• 2 cups of milk – any percentage
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon maple extract
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon extract
• 3-4 cups of stale bread

First, preheat the oven to 350° and cut your bread into bite sized cubes. Stale bread really works best, but if you only have fresh bread  either let it sit out overnight or “cook” the cubed bread in the oven for about 15 minutes until it feels stale. Here’s what my hamburger buns looked like cubed:

Next, grease a 9×13 pan or a 1.5 quart casserole dish and set aside. Then, put the strawberries into a large ziplock and smash them up! I used a meat tenderizer, can you tell? 🙂

In a large bowl, combine the smashed strawberries with the bread cubes, incorporating the chocolate and strawberries evenly throughout the bread. Dump the bread/strawberry mixture evenly into the greased baking dish.

In a bowl, combine eggs, milk, melted butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, maple extract and cinnamon extract.

Pour the mixture over the bread mixture and let it soak about 5 minutes. I used a fork to smush (smush is a word, right?) the bread down and make sure each piece got really saturated. Kinda looks like oatmeal at this point. But don’t eat it…

Once the bread mixture has soaked up some of the liquid, bake it in the oven at 350° for about 1 hour. The bread mixture should puff up and be brown on top. Serve it warm with ice cream!

Enjoy!