Red-Velvet Bread Pudding!!

How good is Bread Pudding?  Imagine your favorite bread baked in a matrix of a sweet and creamy egg custard, maybe topped with a caramel sauce.  Now, what's BETTER than Bread Pudding?  RED-VELVET bread pudding, that's what!  Imagine substituting an entire Red-Velvet cake for the bread and add some cream cheese frosting?!  Yep, I went there.

What's better than Red Velvet bread pudding?  EASY Red Velvet Bread Pudding, that's what!  Let's do this!

You Will Need:

• 1 Crock Pot (yep, a crock pot)
  
• 6 Cups of red velvet cake, un-frosted, cut into cubes
  
• 1 Cup Heavy Cream
• 1 Cup Whole Milk
• 1 Tsp Vanilla
• 4 Eggs
• 1/3 Cup Sugar
• 1/2 Cup White Chocolate Chips
• Cream Cheese Frosting (canned or homemade)
  

My buddy Mark is a lawyer.  He's also married with TWO teenage daughters, so...  Mark does not have a lot of spare time on his hands!  This recipe is for him (and for those like him).  I was able to assemble this entire dish in under 5 minutes! 

The trickiest thing about this recipe is coming up with 6 "heaping" cups of red-velvet cake.  I just bought a red-velvet box cake (Duncan Hines, of course), followed the directions to bake a 13x9 pan sized cake, set it out to cool, and cut the whole thing into cubes.  This was the perfect amount of cake to use... just a bit more than 6 cups, it was perfect, cheap, fast, and easy.  You do need to let it cool down first, and that takes time.  You could always buy a red-velvet cake from the store, but you'll need to scrape off the frosting and that's tough to do.

Dump the cream, milk, vanilla, eggs, and sugar into a bowl.  Using a hand whisk, slowly stir it all together.  Why a hand-mixer?  Two reasons!  First of all, if you use an electric mixer and really beat the cream, it may over-aerate and you'll make whipped cream, instead.  Second, why would get your mixer all dirty?  You'll just have spend more time cleaning it.  Ain't nobody got time for that...

Once the sugar starts to dissolve and the custard gets easier to stir, grab your whisk firmly and put the spurs to it!  Stir, stir, stir until the custard comes together as the fairly thick and full uniform custard that it desperately wants to be.

Next, get out your crock-pot and put in a liner.  While a liner is not required, it makes clean-up, So. Much. EASIER!!  Spray the liner with some non-stick spray.

Now, dump in the cake and drizzle the custard over it.  Drizzle carefully and slowly.  You don't want to over-saturate any one area over another.  Drizzle evenly, and be sure to scrape out the sides of the bowl!

Carefully stir the mixture all together, and then sprinkle the white-chocolate chips over the top.  Put the lid on, turn the crock-pot to HIGH and walk away for 2.5 hours.

When the time is finally up, there's really nothing left to do but to spoon it into a bowl and eat it!  For kicks, you might want to warm up some cream cheese frosting and pour some over the top!