Whenever I get into a waste not want not mood over stale bread, my house is doomed to smelling of bread pudding cooking.  It’s such a warming scent of my childhood.

I’m sure everyone thinks their grandmother’s recipe is the best but mine really is!  Izzy calls this Nanny Flo cake.  It’s best served warm and dusted with caster sugar………when I was a little girl, the sugar was in a blue and white striped plastic dredging pot, it got broken unfortunately – I keep trying to find one on Ebay but so far no joy.

Children love helping with this – particularly squeezing the water out of the bread!

This can be made with butter instead of suet but I don’t think it tastes as good.  Richer people, apparently soaked the bread in milk not water and I’ve tried it that way too but it tastes better with water.  This recipe uses crusts and all.

I’m using Flo’s measurements which are imperial – I’m not sure she ever actually weighed it out – I have a feeling she eyeballed it.  Her recipe doesn’t give temperature or times either – it just says bake until firm and brown!  This is because she wouldn’t have fired up the oven just for this – it would have cooked in with whatever else she was making for dinner that day.  I am far more extravagant though and actually cooked it on its own so I have added my times and temperatures.

Ingredients

6oz sliced bread

2oz currants

2oz sultanas

1oz suet

2oz dark brown sugar

3 teaspoons ground mixed spice

1 large egg

Method

• Preheat the oven to 170C fan.
• Soak the bread in a large bowl of water for a few minutes and then drain off the excess.
• Then it’s time to get in there with your hands and squeeze out the water and at the same time tear/squeeze the bread into small pieces.
• Put all the ingredients into a dry bowl and mix together thoroughly with a spoon.
• Lightly grease a 7inch pie dish and press the mixture evenly into the dish.
• Bake for 30 minutes.
• Dredge with castor sugar and serve directly from the pie dish.