My mom makes the best bread pudding you've ever tasted,cause she uses a blender...Put stale bread(We use in Brazil what we call here french bread.It has a crust like italian bread,but not as hard.),plus eggs,sugar and milk in proportion to look like cake batter.Add some cinamon and nutmeg.On low heat melt some sugar and butter to form the caramel you will coat your bold with.Lay the batter on the caramel,and cook it lidded in bain-marie on medium heat on the stove till it gets firm. If you want to add raisins you can do it after you blend the batter,but I never tried it with peaches;banana blended in the batter is my favorite variation though.
The simplest one I know: Fill a large mixing bowl with stale bread, torn into pieces. Pour a enough milk over the bread to cover it (a large bowl should take a gallon) and let it sit for an hour, stirring once in a while. Whisk 5 eggs with 1.5 cups sugar and mix with the milk/bread until it's relatively even. Bake at 350 in a buttered bundt cake mold until it's cooked through. It will raise way up in the pan, and collapse as it cools. That's my grandmother's recipe. I sneak in vanilla and nutmeg, and raisins could easily be tossed in. Personally, I would serve slices of the pudding with the peaches, as opposed to adding the peaches into the batter, if they're ripe and yummy enough to have a starring role.
For a very simple bread pudding, I find old school cookbooks like Joy of Cooking or New Settlement, etc. are a good source, if you have any like that. Once you have the quantities of the basic ingredients (bread, milk/cream, sugar, vanilla, eggs) you can gussy them up with whatever fruit, spices, raisins, etc. you like. (Peaches sound like a great idea!) A simple homey bread pudding is very forgiving and easy - and for my money, usually better than the trendy more complicated ones I've had.
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