Put A Sweet Spin On Bread Pudding To Salvage Broken Cake

Homemade cakes break, sink in the center, and stick to the pan all the time. That's life. As The Kitchn explains, these chance mishaps can occur for a number of reasons. Whether the oven got too hot, the batter didn't get mixed enough, or the dessert didn't have enough time to cook off, cake baking comes with various perils. How do you redeem yourself and resurrect your confection when this type of culinary tragedy hits? The good news is even a broken cake is still cake, and there are plenty of ways to give a less-than-perfect-looking dessert a new and delicious life. It just takes some imagination – or rather reimagination.

For example, you can use the fractured remains of a cake to make cake pops or cake truffles. When Milk Street recipe developer Rose Hattabaugh baked a broken bundt cake, she cut it up, placed the pieces over scoops of ice cream and fruit, and topped it all off with homemade marshmallows and a chocolate drizzle (via Instagram). But perhaps an even more transformative way to salvage a broken cake is turning it into a bread pudding. As MasterClass explains, bread pudding at its simplest is traditionally made with stale bread that's been soaked in milk, eggs, and sugar and baked. And as it turns out, you can use cake in place of bread for a sweet spin on the classic dish.

According to The Kitchn, one way to save a broken cake is to turn it into a bread pudding. If you've ever used other sweet treats like canned cinnamon rolls in a bread pudding recipe, then you can probably see how simple it would be to swap out the bread for your cake. Cupcake Project notes that when repurposing a scale, you'll want to make sure it doesn't have frosting on it. So if it does, you can scrape that frosting off (and even use it to make a different dessert, such as frosting cookies, if it doesn't contain cake crumbs).

A dry cake is a good candidate for a recipe like this. As MasterClass shares, when making bread pudding, the beauty of stale day-old bread is that it's firmer and more likely to keep its shape after soaking up the egg-milk-sugar mixture. For that reason, MasterClass even suggests drying fresh bread if you want to use it for that recipe. The site also recommends bread pudding as a good way to salvage a dry cake.