Recycling Really is a Good Thing

I've always been an adamant recycler.. we've got several bins to sort our trash in. Gotta do my thing for the environment, yanno? Well actually for the fishies, if I'm to be truthful.. I saw a picture of a poor lil fish that was strangled by one of those plastic thingies that links the cans in a 6-pack. So now, not only do I recycle my plastic 6-pack thingies, but I also cut them up into lil pieces - just in case. No one will ever be able to say that I killed a poor innocent lil schmelt.

Okay well now that I've given a lil too much information on one of my weirdnesses, I should explain that this post is not about recycling my aluminum and plastic products. No.. this post is about recycling banana cake! Dorie's banana cake, to be specific. =)

I've probably made this cake about 8 times since November when I originally tried it. We both love it and think it's the best banana cake ever. This last time that I baked it, I wanted cupcakes/muffins to take to work, so I baked the batter in my cupcake tins. The good thing is they turned out wonderful, the bad thing is - the batter made 36 cupcakes! Not that's a really bad thing.. just way too many cupcakes for us to eat before they started going a lil stale.

I really didn't want to throw the last dozen or so out but it was too late to freeze. I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to make Peabody's bread pudding again - I'll just sub the banana cupcakes/muffins in lieu of the croissants. Sheer genius! This time the pudding was even creamier as the cupcakes were still pretty moist. I added the jumbo raisins and they lent the perfect chew (I heart those jumbo raisins) to the very banana-ey bread pudding. And that's just it - this banana cake gets better with time - so the banana bread pudding had an outstanding banana flavor because the cupcakes were made about a week prior. I also made the toffee sauce and although these were plenty sweet on their own, yanno me.. gotta go for the over kill. =)

I'm very happy with my first attempt at recycling a baked good and I look forward to trying this with something else one day.

As for a recipe.. I just made the banana cake batter as always, baked it in the cupcake tins for about 20 - 30 minutes. I stored them all in an airtight container, and a week later I tore them up and divided them up into 6 ramikins and then made Peabody's custard to pour over. Baked them for about 45 minutes until the tops were golden.. served 'em warm with a drizzle of the toffee sauce. *swoon* If you decide to recycle your own banana cake into bread pudding - be warned that the sauce, although big D lil licious, really is overkill as the pudding is sweet enough. =)