Heart-Attack Bread Pudding

Adapted from Chef Michael Babb's recipe, with apologies. Makes two 8x8 bread puddings.

1 stale muffin
1 French baguette, long (the kind that sticks out of bags in movies)
11 eggs
2 c. whipping cream
3 c. half-and-half
2 c. sugar (half brown, half granulated)
2 Tbsp. vanilla
1 tsp. cinnamon plus enough to dust top of puddings
8 cubes white chocolate bark, chopped until the pile falls off the edge of your cutting board.

Throw the muffin on the floor to distract the cat. Then check that your bread is stale, or dry it in the oven if you are too impatient to wait for natural staleness. I recommend the oven method because I always wait too long otherwise, so my bread goes from stale to moldy, and that's just gross. Tear the bread into small chunks and put half in each 8x8 pan. Put them back in the oven to finish drying while you watch the last 15 minutes of your t.v. show.

Crack all your eggs and pick out the biggest chunks of shell. I figure nobody's going to notice the really small bits. Whisk the eggs until you get tired; make sure the yolks are all broken and things are pretty mixed up. Add in the sugars, the cream, and the half and half. Eyeball the vanilla and cinnamon; why dirty a spoon? Whisk until your sugar is mostly dissolved. Pick out those hard molasses things from the brown sugar; someone could crack a tooth.

Dump the chocolate chunks over your bread and then ladle the milk mix on; turn the whole thing with a spatula as you go so everything sticks together and looks as disgusting as possible. Ideally it should look like something a wildebeest regurgitated. (Mmm, tasty.) After you've got all the milk mix on and everything mixed, let the bread puddings stand for about 30 minutes.

Heat your oven to 385° F (I know) and put in two shallow pans with water in them. Sprinkle the tops of your puddings with cinnamon and set the puddings in the pans. Bake for about an hour, until the pudding sets and the edges turn golden brown. Good luck getting it out of the oven after that, because it will be hot and weigh approximately twelve pounds, not to mention you've surrounded it with a lake of lava. Enjoy!

Oh, right. After the stuff cools enough to get it out of the fridge, you can top it with a white chocolate ganache. This is a particularly good idea if you are suicidal and want to leave a smiling corpse. Heat up a half cup of whipping cream in a saucepot on the stove, and add your remaining four bricks of chocolate (chop them first). Stir until everything is melted and kind of translucent. Dump over your puddings. Eat immediately.