Bread Pudding

I recently found this recipe for bread pudding while searching based on what I remember of my mother's results and method, and after tweaking to suit, I think I have finally succeeded in creating a near perfect version of my mother's bread pudding. In fact I think it's actually better.

Ingredients

1 x 650g loaf of white bread

375g (1 whole packet) of mixed fruit

125g (half a packet) of butter

60g of raw sugar

1 x teaspoon of cinnamon

1 x teaspoon of mixed spice

2 eggs, beaten

More raw sugar & nutmeg for sprinkling

Method

- Tear the bread in to small pieces, soak in 2 litres of cold water for half an hour

- Strain the bread through a colander and squeeze as much water as possible out of it

- Use the block of butter to grease a loaf tin, then melt it slowly in a saucepan

- Add the butter, fruit, sugar & spices to the bread and stir into a glutinous mass with a wooden spoon

- Add the eggs and stir again

- Pour into the tin and sprinkle liberally with more sugar and nutmeg.

- Place on the bottom rack of the oven at 160 deg C for 1 1/2 to 2 hours until firm and pulled away from the side of the tin.

- Cool in the tin then cut into slices an keep in the fridge in an airtight container. (serve cold)

Newstead Folk Festival

Last Thursday, Sean (fiddle teacher) said "There's a folk festival on this weekend at Newstead. It's small but really good". So I checked out the website . Apparently it's an annual event every Australia Day weekend. It used to be at Chewton but they moved it a few years ago.

So I arranged to have the weekend off, (had to sacrifice easter but it looked like I was going to be working then anyway) booked a motel in Castlemaine (cos I just wasn't in the mood for camping), and we drove down there on Friday evening. It took only an hour and a half to get there, which is a big improvement over Canberra.

Like all folk festivals it's a mixture of genres and you have to just pick-and-choose among the bands. I was looking for mainly Celtic (Trouble in the kitchen and a couple of other celtic bands were there, Luke plumb ran a celtic mandolin workshop. and there was a lot of session action at the pub), something different, and hopefully something totally off the wall.

The most important thing being to aviod the singer/songwriter tree hugging neo-hippies with their schmaltzy three chord gum-tree-and-koala songs. This was unfortunately the only area where I didn't totally succeed.

Anyway, it was a good weekend. Sean was right, it's small - only a few hundred people were there. But they have some big names, and the quality is generally good.

Here's some more photos: