No Bake Summer Berry Pudding

I’m sure you’ve seen recipes for this type of no bake puddings before. I remember Martha Stewart making it years ago, and since then many others have reproduced the dessert without any changes in the process. Basically, this no bake berry pudding includes plain white (or wheat) bread, your choice of berries along with a little sugar and maybe some alcohol that is molded together to create a pudding-like dessert. It is weighted down in the refrigerator overnight to coax out even more sweet juices from the delicious berries, and then inverted onto a platter the next day.

Sounds delicious, but it was something I never made. I simply could not get past the fact that in the end, it was going to taste like sweet, berry filled soggy bread…
My dilemma was that fresh berries or even frozen ones, are premium ingredients and not something that should be used to make something that you fear you may not like and ultimately toss out, so I didn’t take this post lightly – if it was something I was going to make, I wanted it to be really good.

I thought about this dessert for a while — two months to be exact. I knocked around a few ideas in my head, but there was nothing that really screamed new or different.

So, like learning to walk again, I started at the beginning.

I decided to begin with the presentation – most pictures I had seen used crust less slices of bread on the outside of the dessert which reinforced this soggy look that was problematic for me.

I began to think back to my culinary school days when we studied how to mold mousse cakes. This wasn’t quite a mousse cake, but it was a molded dessert that required similar consideration. Mousse cakes are lovely to make and eat, and when putting them together you can use some very unique borders to encase the filling. I wanted to make it easy for everyone to try, and I wanted to stay true to the ingredients, but simply offer a better way of making it.

Hmmm….OK, this is good, let’s keep going…I think I might be getting somewhere…

One of the unique borders we used was thin layers of cake that was soaked with a little simple syrup and jam. We would create a huge pile, perhaps using 15 or 20 layers of thin cake that was baked in half sheet pans. Once it was put together, it was covered with plastic wrap and weighted down. When we were ready to prepare the mousse cakes, we would thinly slice this layer and use strips to line the molds.

Now I was getting excited to try this, because this just might work…

My goal was not only to create something that would be easy to replicate for home bakers, but also something that would be a great option for restaurants menus. It can be made well ahead of time and the dessert gets better and better with time — a WIN/WIN situation in my book.

I also thought back to a little tip I had picked up a while ago when I was going to write a post on something called Smörgåstårta. This delicious Scandinavian food uses sliced of bread that is iced with a mixture that uses cream cheese, sour cream and mayo and then layered with all different kinds of fillings. When reading a few of the posts from others who had made this for their families, I came across a few who did something that was curiously different from the rest. They not only sliced the bread lengthwise and cut off the crusts like others, but they used a rolling pin to flatten the slice of bread…

Huh?? Could this be the saving grace for this little dessert?

Now I was really ready to jump in with both feet, so I picked up a few packs of standard pre-sliced bread to see if it would work. I was not only after improving the look of the dessert, but I also wanted a nice texture

After my trial run, I picked up a few tips that I would add when making this again next time…

The first tip would be to buy an unsliced loaf and slice it lengthwise then layer it with the sieved jam. It provides you with the option to slice either shorter or longer pieces, depending on what you need. If you have smaller molds, one long piece would work better because you will only have one joint to worry about hiding in the border, and not two or more.

Many recipes just puree the berries with a little sugar, but I found that the dessert benefitted from cooking the sauce for a little while and then adding the fresh or frozen berries to the cooled, cooked sauce. The berries macerated in the cooked sauce overnight and thinned it out slightly, but not too much. It still had the thickness of a sauce and not thin like juice.

I used the trimmings in the center layers of the dessert as I put it together with the macerated fruit. I was really surprised out how delicious this was. These few tweaks offer a new and improved way to make this very traditional dessert. I am pleased to say that it not only looked beautiful, but the dessert actually tasted like a dense cake and not just soggy bread.

No Bake Summer Berry Pudding
2-4 large loaves white or wheat bread, unsliced
2-3 cups jam, if chunky or with seeds pass thru a sieve
4 cups of berry puree, use your choice of berries
sugar to taste (start with 1 cup and go from there)
4 cups of fresh berries
½ cup Grand Marnier

There are a few things that you need to do the day before – making the sauce and allowing the berries to macerate in the sauce and you have to stack the bread and jam for your border. First, begin by pureeing enough berries to get a total of 4 cups. Generally, 1 cup of berries will give you about ½ cup of puree. Place this in a medium size pot along with the sugar and cook for about 15 minutes on medium heat until the sauce thickens and takes on a deeper color. If your berries need more sugar, add a little more. Once thickened, remove from heat, place into a small bowl and set aside to cool. Once cool, remove 1 cup of sauce, cover and refrigerate, and add the 4 cups of fresh berries and the liquor to the remaining sauce. Cover with plastic and let them macerate in the sauce overnight.

Next, decide on what mold you are going to use. The height of the dish is what is most important because this will dictate how many loaves of bread you will need and how many slices you will need to get out of each loaf. Use the height of the mold as a guide, it’s better that you bread stack be a little higher rather than lower. You can always trim away the excess and use in the center when layering the fruit. Nothing will go to waste, so don’t worry.

I decided I wanted to use my small ramekins since that is what I had on hand. So I measure the sides, and decided that I will have to use 15-20 slices of bread for the edges. Fifteen would have been fine, but I went a little higher just in case. First I got out my rolling pin and rolled out all of the slices, then I used a little jam on each slices and sandwiched them all together.

Once it was all put together, I covered it with plastic and placed it on a small sheet and placed another sheet pan on top of the stacked bread.

Then I placed a heavy gallon of juice on top of this and weighted it down overnight. The next morning, I had this…

Now it was time to slice it into thin strips that would be used to line the ramekins. Slice it all up into equally thick sections. This is what it looked like when I sliced it…

Next, I greased each ramekin with a little pan spray and wiped it out with a paper towel, leaving behind a greasy residue. This residue will help when lining the ramekin with plastic wrap. Cut a piece of plastic wrap that will be large enough to cover the inside of the ramekin and also have some overhang that will help you wrap everything in the end before weighting it down so that the juices do not all leak out.

Begin lining your mold. I decided to use the same border for the top, so I cut out the top and then added the sides.

Then I began to fill the center with lots of juice, fruit and some trimmings. For the bottom, you can use a cut out round of a regular slice of bread either as is or flatten this also. Repeat this with all of your molds, and when you are finished, wrap them with the excess plastic wrap, place them on a sheet pan, top with another sheet pan, top with another sheet pan, refrigerate and weigh it down overnight.

The next day you will have a flattened version that has now set, like this…

Un-mold this onto a serving dish, and if the sauce has not soaked evenly through the border around the cake to make it look uniform, use the extra cup of sauce that you reserved early on to coat the dessert well before service. Serve with some whipped cream, ice cream and extra sauce.