Nutella brioche pudding. Photo: No Recipes.

Sweet bread pudding tends to be delicious, and this one looks to be no exception -- a fair assumption considering it's made with bananas, milk, cream, eggs, Nutella -- Nutella! -- and not just any old bread, but brioche. But what if we said it also smelled like roses? Marc from No Recipes added three tablespoons of rose water to the recipe because ... why not?

Though he pulled this bread pudding together from scraps in his kitchen, Marc writes that the result was "swaths of buttery brioche crust enrobed in a fragrant chocolaty custard, holding bits of tender sweet fruit in its folds." We couldn't have said it better ourselves -- unless, of course, we'd had a chance to taste it.

[Via No Recipes]

Savory bread pudding. Photo: Sarah LeTrent

Few of us want to make a complicated lasagna for solo dining -- by day six, you'll never want to see lasagna again! In this series, AOL Food staffer Sarah LeTrent taste-tests simple recipes suitable for a "table for one."

Bread pudding may be the darling of fall and winter dessert menus, but the casserole also has a reputation as being quite customizable. Sweet or savory? For brunch or for dinner? With meat or without? Bread pudding can be prepared in a myriad of ways and economically designed to help singletons use up stale bread and odds and ends in the fridge.

As a meatless main dish, it spotlights one of the most beloved vegetarian-friendly proteins of all time: the egg. Make it a meal with a side green salad.

This variation is an individual meal that's perfect for those pajama-and-fuzzy-slipper nights.

We admit it. After last week we're kinda sick of ham and reached our saturation point with our delicious but waaayyy too plentiful braided baked challah. Still, being loath to toss out any viable leftovers, we decided this weekend's cooking projects should be all about respite and reformatting.

Hence, a Friday night meal of hard-fried leftover Cheerwine ham with freshly-grated parmesan, egg and black pepper over radiatore (crinkly-shaped) pasta for a makeshift carbonara, and finally (for the sake of our sanity and marriage) a furlough in another part of the barnyard. Saturday night's chicken rubbed all over with a lazy pesto -- basil, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil whirred through the food processor -- was delectable straight from the oven. Somehow it was even more satisfying with the leftovers, bones and giblets cooked down for an herbed-up chicken soup with radiatore a day later.

We trotted back to the pig pen with smoked ribs slathered in mustard on Sunday, but that was just to keep us from making an all-day gobblefest of our challah bread pudding buttermilk ice cream. See, our challah recipe (we like Flickr user mollyali's recipe, pictured above) yields two big braids, and though we foist some on friends and flip up plenty of French toast throughout the week, inevitably a portion goes stale, and we were taught not to waste. Bread pudding seemed a simple solution, but we'd had a cup or ten of caffeine by that point and an awful lot of buttermilk on hand from the ongoing Biscuit Mission. So we got to cranking up some ice cream.

Get the recipe after the jump and use the comments to let us know if ramps are up yet where you are, whether you busted out the grill, or tell us whatever else you rustled up this weekend.

By the time you lug yourself out of bed at 11 a.m. on a Sunday, do you really want to spend another 30 minutes prepping brunch before you start cooking? Try using make-ahead brunch recipes for an even more relaxing weekend morning.

I love cooking on Sunday morning. Sunday is usually the one day of the week I can do whatever I want, so they're pretty laid back and slow. It's only been a recent discovery that I enjoy cooking on my one easy day of the week, as opposed to a bowl of cereal, but I'm glad I finally did come to that realization.

Some of you may remember a post from earlier this week about Nazuki, a spice bread from Georgia. Well, everyone's been pretty busy this week, so the second loaf was starting to go stale. Of course one of the best ways to use up stale bread is a nice bread pudding, and that's what I made for my Sunday morning. My first thought was to make a savory bread pudding with some tomatoes that I need to use up, but I just couldn't see using a sweet bread in a savory dish. The flavors wouldn' mesh.

After breifly flirting with making French toast instead, I mixed up some milk and eggs with some cinnamon and brown sugar, then pourd it over the crumbled Nazuki in a baking dish. The bread pudding didn't take very long to bake, and it was delicious when it was done. It was a sweet dish, but not any more so than French toast and less so than sweet syrup on pancakes. If you don't have any Nazuki on hand, I bet this would be great with cinnamon raisin bread. The recipe is after the jump.

I never ate bread pudding while I was growing up. I remember hearing about it once on a cooking show and going to ask my mom what it was. The way she described it made it sound like unappealing, dried up bits of bread in lumpy pudding and so I put it out of my mind. Fast forward to years later when I was out to eat and a friend ordered the chocolate bread pudding. When it arrived, it looked and smelled amazing. My friend noticed my fascination and offered me a bite. From that moment on, I was a convert.

Over at Hogwash, Jess has also spent years having a shaky relationship with bread pudding. However, it looks like things are changing for her now that she's made a batch of the stuff with the stale leftovers from a loaf of Honey Orange bread. She is still struggling with the name bread pudding and so has taken to calling her batch French Toast Pie. She can call it whatever she wants, as long as she's willing to share!

I used to hate bread pudding. It was just a bored, budget-minded housewife's way of passing off stale bread as dessert. Then I met a bread pudding that changed my mind and ever since, I've been a big fan. Huge.

But bread pudding isn't just for dessert, as per Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks, who made a savory bread pudding using Spring's springy-est of vegetables, asparagus. Heidi used a mix of sourdough and walnut breads, and though recipes for bread pudding usually say "stale" bread, that doesn't give you license to use rock hard bread that you bought two weeks ago. Use bread that you've let dry overnight, or as Heidi did, left out for a day or two.

Cook and Eat's latest posting of Honey Orange Bread Pudding looks like it is the perfect combination of bright, seasonal citrus and the custardy comfort of regular bread pudding. In short, it might just very well be one of the most appealing winter desserts that we've seen all season - especially because the orange used in the recipe was blood orange. The recipe is a take on one of Macrina Bakery's offerings, which uses lemon instead of orange. It is a restaurant style bread pudding, which means that instead of being baked in a casserole dish and scooped out for serving, as so many homemade bread puddings are, it is baked in a loaf pan and simply sliced into portions when it has come out of the oven and set up. C&E used mini loaf pans and baked the bread puddings in a waterbath very slowly, ensuring a creamy and delicious result.

Bread pudding is almost a souffle for cheaters. Because of the eggs in it, it puffs up a bit in the oven, but the bread gives it enough structure that it never falls. The bread also keeps the custard component of the pudding from cracking or facing any of the other flaws that can strike a cooked custard. What this all boils down to is the fact that bread puddings are incredibly easy and will taste great almost without regard for what you do to them. How can you argue with that?

For this bread pudding, I started with the basic recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, which is a great source for basic recipes. I changed it by adding dried cherries and using challah bread for added richness. I topped it off with a delicious dessert sauce. The final dish is homey, comforting and very delicious. It can be put together very quickly and served either warm or cold, so it is just as good for entertaining as it is for quiet nights at home.

Bread pudding is more in the category of "comfort food" than something elegant, but that doesn't stop this serving of lemon-scented Bread-Pudding French Toast from looking both stunning and absolutely mouth-watering. Ivonne, the blogger who writes Cream Puffs in Venice prepared this as part of an relaxing Sunday brunch. It was made even more relaxing by the fact that the custardy casserole is prepared the night before and simply popped into the oven in the morning. She used fresh lemon zest to give the bread pudding a light, springy taste - the perfect pick-me-up for a gorgeous April morning. Of course, if you serve it with whipped cream instead of maple syrup, it can easily become a delightful dessert. Want the recipe? Look no further than her post.

When Kitchenmage's eyes fell upon some unused Granny Smith apples, she began to think of ways to use them in a dessert. Unfortunately, she didn't have enough of them to make something primarily of apples, like a pie. In a fit of improvisation, she ended up softening the apples on the stovetop and tossing the chunks with almonds, amaretto and torn up pieces of amaretto cake, which had been lying forgotten in the freezer. The mixture was placed in ramekins and covered with a custard mixture - much like a bread pudding, but with cake - and baked. She reports that the result was delicious. Though there is no recipe or perhaps even a way to precisely recreate this dessert, the story is an excellent source of inspiration for the next time you get a sugar craving but have nothing on hand to satisfy it.

I used to hate bread pudding, but I'm not sure why, since I hated it without ever having tried it. It was the word "bread," I think. "Bread" just does not sound like it should be a dessert. Ever.

Then by accident, I tasted it and I had a Come-to-Jesus moment. I realized the ignorance of my ways and converted. I love bread pudding.

This past holiday, though, was my first time making bread pudding, which is odd since it truly is a very simple, home-y dessert. I suppose I just never thought to make it because, well, we're Asian and we don't always have leftover bread laying around the kitchen. Leftover rice? Yes, and it becomes fried rice. Leftover bread? Not so much.

But I took a very basic recipe for bread pudding and added dried cranberries because I like them. The bread pudding was delicious, though I think I may add a bit more milk or cream next time to make it even more like custard. I may also add white chocolate chunks because it just goes so well with cranberries. The basic recipe below just begs to be personalized with other dried fruits (though I hate raisins so I just can't recommend those), chocolate, nuts, and even liquours.