Accidentally Awesome Bread Pudding

I'm a fan of those delightful children's picture books that reference or create a recipe within their stories. One of my very favorites is Mary Ann Hoberman's Seven Silly Eaters, in which a mom's seven picky-eater kids accidentally bake her the perfect birthday cake when their personal quirky favorite foods miraculously combine after a clandestine baking session in the night kitchen. The book offers the hint of  a recipe by telling us these kids are dedicated eaters to a single named food each - with nary a hint of how much might go into the amazing birthday cake. I ambitiously set out to make this cake with my preschool class this spring. I looked at the ingredient list: warm milk, pink lemonade, fresh-baked bread, applesauce, eggs (fried and poached), and lumpy oatmeal....
....and I pretty immediately took the easy way out and looked for a recipe online that someone surely would have developed for the book. The author herself published one on her website......so I used that one. Disappointingly, it was reminiscent of the book but to literal preschoolers not quite the same as we had to sleuth out the ingredients it takes to make bread rather than use actual bread. Although they were good sports (and we even adapted it to be be vegan and gluten-free), I wasn't convinced the primary source wouldn't make a similarly idealistic cake. My 10 year-old felt the same.

The great thing about being ten years old is the perpetual willingness to suspend disbelief even when you know it's going to make things harder. She was insistent that we use the book's "recipe." So yes, we warmed some milk on the stove, made simple syrup and real lemonade with a dash of grenadine, opened a jar of homemade apple butter, cooked some oats with a conservative amount of water and let it set to lump up. I probably should not have, but I suggested we could use the eggs raw rather than cook first and re-cook them with the other ingredients. I also pointed out that to bake fresh bread for our recipe we wouldn't get to bake the actual cake for several more hours. So we compromised on pulverizing three slices of gluten-free bread.

And it worked! We made up measurements for our six pure ingredients, recorded them meticulously, and put a round and soupy-looking cake in the oven for an hour at 375 degrees. After an hour, we gave it fifteen more minutes to get golden. Our dish emerged from the oven smelling divine. It cooked up fairly solid, though I began to see its potential as the rival to many signature bread puddings I've dined on around town. Our cake, superbly well-served by its heavy ratio of homemade apple butter made from fresh-pressed cider, provided the sensation of eating oatmeal and tasting like apple pie. It was delicious. It was delicious enough to make again and consider whether reducing the amount of liquids to produce a more cake-like treat would outweigh the goodness of an accidental bread pudding. Mrs. Peters and her seven silly eaters were content to eat their pink cake for every meal ever after.....I was happy with being patient enough to create a recipe as we went that was edible! And it was downright delicious when served with fresh-whipped cream.