The Classic Dessert You Can Reinvent With Stale Glazed Donuts

With its soft, creamy, and warm texture, bread pudding is the ultimate smorgasbord kind of dessert; a way of combining bread, cake, cookies, and other goodies to create something new, sweet, and unique. For a sweet substitute for stale bread, consider incorporating stale glazed donuts. The hardened texture may make them unappealing to eat on their own. But used in bread pudding, stale glazed donuts can be given new life.

Aside from fresh dozen donuts straight from a donut shop, bread pudding with glazed donuts (or another favorite) may be the next best thing. The bread pudding recreates that fresh-from-the-fryer, melt-in-your-mouth texture that makes a fresh donut a real treat. The donuts can be substituted for bread in any recipe and more sweetness — such as Amazon Fresh Baking Chocolate Chips or Hershey's Chocolate Sauce — can be added into the pudding mixture or as a garnish on the finished product.

Swapping glazed donuts for bread is just one way to add more sweetness to bread pudding. A can of cinnamon rolls can also be a bread substitute, adding the sweet flavors of cinnamon rolls plus a sweet glaze to the top of the finished pudding. Leftover pancakes can also add breakfast-inspired flavors to bread pudding as they soak up milk, custard mix, and other ingredients (and they can be topped with maple syrup).

Additionally, this classic dessert can be dressed up with melted ice cream instead of custard. Ice cream has the basic elements of custard (sugar and cream especially), and, much like the donut substitute, any ice cream can be used so the flavor combinations are nearly endless. Adding eggs will ensure the filling of an ice cream bread pudding stays together during the baking process. This makes it easy to make a coffee-inspired bread pudding (with coffee or cinnamon ice cream), a chocolate lover's bread pudding (using chocolate donuts and/or chocolate ice cream), or a Rocky Road bread pudding.