This could easily be your winning comfort dessert for when you have a sleep over or a house dinner with a bunch of close friends. Or it can just be a made for a night by yourself trying to catch up with your favorite TV shows. Either way it is really good and is one of my recently favorite creations…

As you can see from the video below, this recipe has been recorded by Snapchat as I was making it. I’m sorry for the horizontal view and I wasn’t aware of how it would be shown on the computer compared to the phone. Anyways, that was really rough idea of how I made up this recipe. The recipe below will be more refined as I was typing this out. I made some changes compared to the video, but it would still be the same dessert.

I’ve always love croissant, and to incorporate it into any of my recipes is just fabulous. That being said, I did write about a croissant pudding recipe back a few years ago, based on the recipe I got from Nigella Lawson. If you don’t know who she is then you might want to now. She is considered by many as the goddess of food. Her style of cooking is so elegant but full of flavors. Until you really try out her recipes, I guess it would still remain a myth to you. Nigella’s cooking shows always include at least one or two episodes talking about party food, home dinner food, or just food for the crowds in general. The rest of the episodes can be simple meal or dessert you can make at home for your family or just yourself when you are bored and have some leftovers at sight. The bread pudding recipe is one of the latter. The other adaptation from this recipe is from Gordon Ramsay’s upside down banana tart. I guess no introduction needed for chef Ramsay. This banana tart tatin got me interested. I’ve loved the idea of upside down caramelization, but this recipe was the first one I actually noticed, or watched.

This recipe did came to realization one winter night 2015. I was bored and hungry and sweet craving. There were some bananas and some day-old croissants at home. I didn’t have any puff pastries at home, nor any pie crust, so I decided to go wild with what I saw. So came this banana tatin croissant pudding (LOL). Mind you I’ve done some stupid and weird combinations before when I started to experiment with food and recipes. After years of stupidity, combining recipes and making new flavors became much more efficient and much less wasteful. So before you really try to make any new recipes, I’d suggest that you closely follow the recipes that have been proven and tested, and really understand how and why they are the way they are, so that you can use that knowledge for yourself later on. Since I didn’t scale out any ingredients when I was making this, maybe the recipe below has some sort of missing flavors. Please be kind to let me know after you test it out. I will learn and adjust it along the way. Now let’s start!

Banana Tatin Croissant Pudding

Processing time:  1.5 hours
Servings: 8 – 10 people

Ingredients:

• 5 or 6 ripe bananas
• 1/2 stick of butter, soften at room temperature (1/2 cup)
• 1 cup demerara sugar
• 1 tbsp freshly ground ginger
• 6 palm-size butter croissants
• 6 eggs
• 1 1/2 cup of 18% table cream (go as heavy as your weight :P) (around 375ml carton box)
• 1tsp vanilla extract

Process:

• Preheat oven to 375 F or 190 C
• But the bananas to around 1-1.5 inch tall
• In an iron skillet or metal baking pan (9″), spread the butter over the bottom. Mix the ground ginger with the sugar and sprinkle all over the butter. Firmly press the banana horizontally and tightly onto the butter. Make sure there is as little space between them as possible. Set the pan/skillet on a stove at high heat.
• Meanwhile, lightly beat the eggs together with the cream and vanilla extract. Tear the croissants into big chunks. Fully soak the croissants in the cream and egg mix. If the croissants soak in too much liquid and it seems dry, add more cream.
• Once the banana starts to heat up and bubble, turn the heat down to medium and let cook until the sugar is all melted and caramelized. This will take around 15-25 minutes from the time of bubbling.
• Once the bananas have nicely caramelized at the bottom, add the soaked croissants on top. Make sure to cover all the bananas with the croissants. Pour the excess egg and cream mix over the pan/skillet. Sprinkle some sugar on top.
• Immediately put in to the oven and bake for another 20 – 30 minutes, until the top of the pudding is golden brown and the pan/skillet is covered in fluffy pudding.
• Serve hot as is with a good glass of wine, or with a big scoop of ice cream.

Notes:

• I really prefer cast iron skillet for this recipe as it is easy to move from stove to oven with the long handle, and its ability to retain heat at the bottom. This helps a lot when you want to caramelize anything.
• You can start by following this recipe and adjust as you like. The sugar in this recipe seems a lot, but it actually doesn’t, as we do not add any sugar to the pudding. The sugar would caramelize as well so it won’t leave such a strong sweetness to the entire dish. However, if you do feel like you want it a bit less sweet feel free to adjust it.
• Besides ginger, you can totally change around and play with some other spices like cinnamon, rosemary, cumin, or even black pepper or chili powder. The creativity is endless and it only stops where your skepticism starts.

Bon Appetit!