BRIOCHE CUSTARD EXPLOSION

I hereby bequeath this recipe to Gillian who requested it's feature on this blog and to Bart, living downstairs, whose main excitement of my friends coming over for dinner is that THIS might be in the oven. To his joy it often is.

This pud bounded into my life when I threw a 'food heritage party' - pretty geeky I know, but look what I learned! Huge thanks go to William who brought it along and more to Lily who confided her family recipe in him all those years ago.

This is my kind of food. Negligible faff and positively bursting with flavour. Boxes are ticked with incredible gusto: so simple, so sweet, so luxuriously indulgent and so bloody quick! This is perfect dinner party fodder. It takes 5 minutes to whip into the oven and then you can forget about it while you eat your meal. Yet another of this pudding's many accolades is that it really can't go wrong. How could it when it's core ingredients are brioche, cream, chocolate and raspberries?! The key is to keep the oven on a nice low heat so that the eggy custard thickens without splitting and the chocolate doesn't burn. Of course, this is calorific hell but Fat Is Flavour - just enjoy it!

Fresh from the oven, and dusted in icing sugar

2 minutes later and there were just 3 of us! Check that Ooozing Chocolate.

This has served 6 people and it has served 3, it depends how greedy you are!

Ingredients
300g brioche
150g creme fraiche
One punnet of raspberries
100ml double cream
4 tbsp caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
Lindt extra creamy chocolate bar - all in!
2 large eggs

Recipe
Preheat the oven to 140°C.
First make a custard by mixing the eggs, sugar, cream and creme fraiche together with the vanilla extract.
Tear up the brioche into large-ish chunks (enough for a small handful) and leave them to soak in the glorious custard mix. Meanwhile, break the chocolate into half squares.

Assemble
In an oven-proof dish, layer it up. Half of the wet brioche is followed by the chocolate which is followed by the raspberries (keeping a handful behind) and then the other half of the brioche on top. Pour the rest of the custard mix over and sprinkle with raspberries.
Cook for about 45 minutes before giving it a quick dusting of icing sugar et voila. Serve it hot, so all the chocolate is still oozing M&S food porn stylee.