Christmas Bread Pudding

This is by far more popular than fruit cake, and has all fresh fruits and ingredients.

 This is one version of my Banana Bread Pudding that is perfect for Christmas. 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Things You'll Need:

• 8 slices of any kind of bread you like, I prefer French or Italian loaf bread
• 4 cups of milk  
• 1 1/2 sticks of margarine or butter 
• 1 and 1/2  cup of sugar 
• 8 eggs  
• 1 tbsp. Vanilla extract
• 1 tsp Almond extract
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
• 4 large apples chopped and diced
• 1 cup of golden raisins or dried cranberries
• 1 cup of drained cherries
• 1 1/2 cup of  crushed pecans or walnuts your choice
•  1 1/2 cups flaked coconut (optional)
• 9 X 13 inch pan
• 2 large mixing bowls

Instructions: 

Step 1
 Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl, tear up by hand all of your slices of bread.

Step 2
 Add in eggs, and milk, both extracts, and cherries (if you have chosen to use them )and mix together well. Basically you are mixing all wet ingredients together.

Step 3
In your bread bowl, add in all dry ingredients and stir until all the bread is covered in the sugar and spices. You can add raisins, apples, nuts, shredded coconut at this time. Now dump this mixture into your egg/milk bowl. 

Step 4
You want to stir by hand all of the ingredients thoroughly and let the mixture sit for about 1/2 hour in your fridge so that the bread fully absorbs your egg/custard mixture.

Step 5
Once you have let the bread pudding mixture soak for a while in the refrigerator (the longer it soaks the better), you can now pour it into your buttered 9 X 13 inch baking dish. Add around 9 pats of margarine or butter to the top. This will melt as the bread pudding cooks. Garnish with extra Pecan halves.

Step 6
Bake your bread pudding until the pudding is well set, not wiggly when you jiggle the pan. Start checking your bread pudding for done-ness after it has been in the oven around 45 minutes, and every 10 minutes after that, to prevent over cooking.

Note: Some bread pudding recipes call for a sweet sauce or glaze but this recipe is sweet enough on its own.