Bribery – at its Finest!

Earlier this month, we had a wonderful OktoberFest party in our activity room.  It was great, but the staff who put it on over-budgeted a little on the soft pretzels.  The leftovers got put in a plastic bag and stowed away in the fridge. 
 
Monday, the re-appeared again, and were going to get tossed since they weren’t exactly fresh anymore. 
 
Before that could happen, I grabbed the bag and said I’d take them.  Bringing them to the conference room where we eat our meals, I ended up sampling one. 
 
They weren’t too bad (but not too good, either).
 
Then, I had an idea – why not make bread pudding?  Salted caramel’s become quite popular lately, right?
 
I did a little research, and, sure enough, “salted caramel pretzel bread pudding” is a thing!  Multiple recipes online confirmed my hopes.
 
Rather than go through the trouble of making a fancy salted caramel sauce, though, I decided to resort to my “tried and true” recipe which I had come up with during the bagel inundation of 2019/20. 
 
The salt from the pretzels would add a wonderful dimension to this recipe; also, soft pretzels are similar in texture to bagels, so it should work out fine, I thought. 
 
The batch made two pans of “salted caramel pretzel bread pudding,” which turned out to be very tasty.  We enjoyed it with our lunch that day. 
 
Afterwards, we stored some away in the fridge, put I still had a larger pan untouched. 
 
I stuck it in the activity room fridge, planning to serve it for the residents’ snack-time sometime soon. 
 
Yesterday, I found out that they were having a dance with accordion music in the afternoon.  I asked our activity director when snack would be, and found out that she was actually wanting something a little more special (than the customary “package deal”) for the occasion. 
 
This would be the perfect way to use my bread pudding, I figured!
 
I would coax residents down for the afternoon’s entertainment with the small of delicious caramel bread pudding warming in the oven.
 
Sometimes people are less than eager to attend these events, unfortunately, and we’re not opposed to a little good old fashioned bribery at times.    
 
Let it be known: they polished off the whole pan!

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