This was made out of necessity, the reasons being:  A.  I had to use up some dried out cornbread that was left over from making a chicken with cornbread stuffing the week before.  B.  I was only able to get a couple of cups of raspberries from our young bushes this year and froze a small baggy of them to save for a special occasion.   C.  I just need bread pudding in my life and have to make it every once in a while to put a smile on my face.  It was a bread pudding kind of week.

We are not big cornbread fans in this family.  I have a recipe that I use to make a sweet, light, moist version that is almost nice enough to be served with dessert.  In fact, my grandmother put butter and jelly on it the morning after I baked it once when she came for a visit.   The batch I threw together for the stuffing was made right from the recipe on the bag of generic self-rising cornmeal that my husband accidentally bought instead of regular yellow cornmeal when I asked him to pick some up on his way home from work one day.  It was probably the worst cornbread I’ve ever eaten.  It did make fabulous stuffing, though.  The rest was going to end up being fed to the chickens if I didn’t do something with it and none of us were going to touch it, I was certain.

Well, what do you do with old, dried up bread?  Make bread pudding of course.  I had never heard of anyone using cornbread, however, and the idea wouldn’t have appealed to me if I hadn’t recently stumbled across a recipe for polenta cake that sounded interesting.  I decided to toss my raspberries in and see how it turned out.

I thought it was okay, a little dry, like the cornbread I made it with (duh…should have seen that coming), but my older boy said it was one of the best things he had ever eaten.  I’ll take a compliment from a teenager any day, but next time I will increase the amount of milk and use the Sweet Southern Cornbread recipe I usually use.

Ingredients:

4 c. cornbread, broken into pieces

1 c. raspberries

1 c. milk

1 c. sugar

4 whole eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Pinch of salt

Method:

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a 6 qt. casserole dish, combine the raspberries and cornbread.  To make the custard, beat the eggs and add the remaining ingredients to them.

Pour over the cornbread and raspberries and allow to soak for 20 minutes.  Bake for one hour.  I poured a little half and half over my portion just before digging in.

Whipped cream or vanilla ice cream would have been heavenly.

Note:  I threw my frozen raspberries right in.  Worked just fine.