Do you sometimes have leftover bread that goes hard?

Well, it happened to me this year at the end of the fondue season. After the last fondue, the typical bread cubes remained uneaten and since I always try to use all leftovers, I looked for a possibility this time as well. I don’t know so many recipes for bread recycling, actually only three. A salty bread and cheesecake, French toast and this bread cake.

After a look in my pantry, I chose to make a bread cake. At the moment I have a bit more time (due to the current pandemic which makes me stay home as much as possible), so I checked my stocks and found some things that fit into this cake.

The bread cake is an old Ticino (southern canton of Switzerland) speciality and is still eaten with pleasure. You can find it on every major market and every family in Ticino has its own secret recipe. So there are an infinite number of different recipes.

In the past, fresh bread was not baked every day, but only about every two weeks. But in larger quantities. As a result, there was, of course, a lot of hard bread and therefore the need to make something out of it.

Beside hard bread, other ingredients were used, which were in the house anyway. Almonds or nuts, pine nuts, candied fruits and raisins, hard cookies and sometimes a little grappa. The bread cake also tasted a little different every time, because mainly leftovers were used. In addition, chocolate or cocoa powder was added and of course sugar.

I always have customers who ask me for sandalwood powder, because it seems that this was also an ingredient. But this custom got a little lost. I suppose because it’s so difficult to find sandalwood powder. I tried it anyway, the cake turned slightly red, but the taste didn’t change.

The bread cake is soft inside and crispy on the outside and tastes even better on the second day than freshly baked. It tastes so good that one is actually glad to have to use hard bread sometimes.

Since I don’t like candied fruit very much, I left it out of my recipe. I didn’t have pine nuts either and replaced them with cashew nuts. But of course, my cakes have to have a spice in them, I chose cassia-cinnamon and a hint of coffee spice mixture, but that’s not essential.

Here is the recipe:

Bread Cake

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Prep Time 20

Cook Time 1 10

Resting Time 20

Total Time 1 50

Course Cake, Dessert

Cuisine Swiss

Servings 1 cake 25 cm

Ingredients

200 g hard bread
5.5 - 7 dl boiling hot milk less with white bread, more with wholemeal bread
60 g amaretti or ladyfingers or other hard biscuits
150 g dried fruit raisins or whatever else you have in the house
2 eggs
1 tsp cassia cinnamon
1 tsp coffee spice
120 g raw sugar
3 tbsp cocoa powder
60 g nuts chopped
2 tbsp pine nuts whole or cashew nuts chopped
Few butter flakes

Instructions

Preheat the oven at 180°C, cover a springform pan of approx. 30 cm with baking paper and butter the rim.
Cut the bread and cookies into small pieces and pour the boiling milk over them. Cover and let stand for 20 minutes. Then mix everything well with a fork or whisk.
Add dried fruit, eggs, spices, sugar, cocoa powder and nuts and mix everything.
Pour the dough into the springform pan. Cover with the pine nuts or cashew nuts. Spread butter flakes on top.
Bake at 180°C for about 50 minutes, then reduce temperature to 150°C and bake for another 20 minutes