Nutella Bread Pudding With Blackberry Coulis

When it comes to dessert, I hate cloyingness. And blackberries—so gem-dark and ominous, a touch tart, sometimes even bitter—are exactly right with the sweet, familiar base of a bread pudding. This one is laced with vanilla, cream, and Nutella for those days when you just need a little chocolate in your life. Especially when you're at home and don’t have plans whatsoever to leave the house. It’s not very often, after all, that you see bread pudding on restaurant dessert menus anymore—which is a nice reminder that it is, and has always been, home food. But there was a moment in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, as Nigella Lawson writes in How to Eat, that it went “from stodgy disparagement to fashionable rehabilitation and back to not-that-again clichédom.” The main thing about bread pudding, anyway, is that it’s one of the best ways to use up stale, leftover bread you have lying around in one fell swoop. But I suppose I love this dessert especially because it reminds me of my early days in New York, back when I seemed somehow to survive on sourdough toast and Nutella alone. Every morning I’d pop a slice into the toaster, spread on the chocolate-hazelnut spread, and enjoy it with a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts hazelnut coffee. Rinse, slather, repeat. This recipe holds that dulcet memory for me—and I hope that, once you take a bite, it will provide the same for you and yours. Note: Please feel free to use whatever bread you have left over. My baker at Silver Moon Bakery recommended a brioche for this bread pudding, but I went with sourdough because it lends an almost malted savoriness, not to mention a toothsome chewiness, that balances everything out.