A slow cooker bread & butter pudding with marmalade takes just 2 hours to cook. This bread and butter pudding recipe serves 2-3 portions, although that’s a question of how hungry you are. I used it as two hearty portions.  I am cooking for one, so use a 3.5 litre slow cooker – and I have accumulated a variety of dishes that fit inside my slow cooker, so I can cook smaller portions.

This slow cooker bread & butter pudding had marmalade added and was cooked in a tin foil takeaway style case inside the ceramic pot.  The bonus is it’s cost under 60p to make, cheaper and better than buying a frozen packet from the supermarket at £2 or more!

Most of the weights/measures given below you can ignore – I weighed mine just so I could be specific in the recipe (and for costing purposes).  The method comes down to: Make a triple layered sandwich containing all the ingredients except the egg/milk, then mix and pour the egg/milk over the top, then bake in the slow cooker – it’s as easy as that.

Ingredients for Bread & Butter Pudding with Marmalade:

• 3 slices of medium sliced bread.
• 35 grams margarine, or butter
• 90 grams marmalade
• 40 grams dried fruit
• 15 grams sugar, I just used granulated sugar as that’s what I had
• 80 grams milk (80ml), I used whole milk
• 1 large egg
• Tiny splash of vanilla essence, optional

Method:

1. Make a triple-decker sandwich by buttering the bread on both sides and spreading margarine inside the layers.  How much you use of each is entirely a personal preference really.  Sprinkle a little sugar inside each layer as you go and also sprinkle your dried fruit inside each layer.
   
2. There is no need to grease the inside of your dish if you’ve buttered both sides of the bread.  If you find that a “bit mucky” on the hands and have left the top/bottom unbuttered, then grease the dish to stop it sticking.   I use takeaway foil dishes, bought from Poundland at 10/£1 since I discovered they fit perfectly inside my 3.5 litre oval slow cooker.
3. Slice up your sandwiches any way you like and lay/squash them inside the tin foil case. I start off thinking it’ll look wonderful, but then I end up shoving the last few bits into the nooks and crannies and it looks like a dog’s dinner – but it all cooks up just fine 🙂
   
4. Beat your egg into the milk (with these quantities, a mug and a fork are sufficient).
5. Slowly pour your egg/milk mix over the bread, so it’s soaking through from the top to the bottom… you don’t want any dry bits.  At this stage you might think “this is a bit wet/there’s too much milk”, but it will all soak in, if you’re worried, you can always set aside a little egg/milk and add it a bit later when you’ve peeked and realised there was room for it!
   
6. Place the dish in the fridge so the egg/milk mix can soak in, especially as there’s dried fruit in there that needs to rehydrate.  A minimum of 30 minutes is “enough”, but you can make this recipe the night before and leave it in the fridge for up to a day, just cover it over with a lid.
7. When you remove it from the fridge, just press the bread gently down, to ensure any liquid’s redistributed a little and the top’s not left a little dry (if you think it’s a little dry you can always add another sprinkle of just milk to the top.  I like to then sprinkle a further teaspoon of sugar over the top.
8. Place the foil dish inside the slow cooker, there is no need to add any water to the pot, but if you’re a nervous type then add just 1/2″ of water at the bottom.  Turn the slow cooker onto High.  Place a tea-towel under the slow cooker lid, place the lid on the slow cooker and leave it to cook on high for 2 hours.
   

Serve, I usually serve bread and butter pudding with custard!

Optionally, if you like the top to be a little browner, or more crisp, you can give it a quick browning under a grill; I don’t bother most of the time.

Serve with custard.  Instant custard powder works well if you’re just cooking one portion as you can spoon out just how much you want to use without having any leftovers that need using up.  Packet instant custard mix lasts months/years in the cupboard…

How Much Does Bread & Butter Pudding Weigh?:

In order to compare my effort/cost, versus buying a ready meal, I weighed the end result.  This dish started off weighing 430 grams before being cooked and 390 grams after it’d been cooked.

A typical supermarket bread & butter pudding will suggest that 125 grams is a portion, so that makes three portions of dessert!

Freeze Bread & Butter Pudding

You can freeze this bread and butter pudding before you cook it, or after it’s been cooked.  If you freeze it before cooking then defrost it in the fridge overnight and cook in the slow cooker for 2 hours on the day.  You can cook it from frozen, it’ll just take longer, possibly 3-3.5 hours, so it’s easier to defrost it if you can.

You can also freeze it once it’s cooked, either the whole pudding or just the leftovers.

Q&A

1. Does the bread & butter pudding go brown when it’s cooked in the slow cooker?  Yes, the top does brown to some degree, the photo above is entirely cooked in the slow cooker.
2. Does bread & butter pudding go crispy when it’s cooked in the slow cooker?  Not really – the tea-towel is added to soak up some of the excess moisture, but it’s not got a “crispy” top like it would have in a regular oven.  You can always crisp the top using a grill, or even a kitchen blow torch if you’ve such a thing.  The top does have texture, it’s just not what you’d call crispy.

Bread & Butter Pudding Cost:

To buy a bread and butter pudding ready made costs £1.50-£2 or so, for the cheaper versions!  An outrageous price.  Sainsburys will sell you a 2-pack of 125g individual bread and butter puddings for £2 (80p/100g).  My bread and butter pudding recipe above is the equivalent of three of these, so the same quantity would cost £3.

Using cheaper ingredients, from Aldi or Lidl, the costs were roughly bread/6p, margarine/5p, marmalade/6p, dried fruit/9p, sugar/1p, milk/8p, egg/9p. 

The foil dish I use also needs to be added into the cost, these are 10p. 

TOTAL: The total cost is therefore about 44p + 10p = 54p.  Rounding that up, this makes for well under 60p to make 2-3 portions of bread & butter pudding with marmalade!  That’s just 20p/serving (or 30p if you cut it in half like I did).