The Bread Pudding Lesson

I recently cooked my second bread pudding as desert for our catering menu in Mobile Chef.  The first one failed bigtime!

I am no pastry chef that's why I settle for the easy deserts.  Aside from bread pudding I also make ice-box cakes.  Also another one that's easy to make.

Bread puddings are among the forgotten deserts.  Except for Figaro, I don't see anyone serving this on their menu.

I love bread puddings.  Together with egg pie and brazo de mercedes, bread pudding is a desert that I grew up with.

Bread pudding brings about a home-cooked feel to it.  When it's served, it feels like there is grandma's loving touch in there somewhere.  But, like in everything else, it has to be done right.

Baking the bread pudding was a labor of love for me.   I want to do it right.  And put my heart into it to get it right.  I want to replicate exactly what I love about eating bread puddings.  Chewy, crusty, creamy with a soft center.  And I particularly love my bread puddings with chocolate.  I remember taping for Rounin some years back and one of my actresses, Agot Isidro, brought us a bread pudding with chocolate that I loved and I wanted to incorporate that in my bread pudding.

I started working on my pudding midnight of thursday and I actually finished making it at 4 in the morning.  I thought it looked great.  Just to be sure, I ate a chunk of it and I really loved the texture of my pudding.  Exactly how I thought it should be.  But the question was, is everyone gonna love it as well?  And come Friday night's event, everyone loved it (or so they say), they raved about it.  I served my bread pudding with the mocha sauce and everyone said it worked.

It's a good feeling that you managed to finish something that you worked hard for.  It's a far greater feeling that you came up with something good.

Sure, I worked hard on my bread pudding.  But if it didn't come out right, no amount of hard work can make up for its failure.  Any labors of love should go beyond than just that.  It should work.  It should be good enough.

To be patted on the back just on hard work alone is for mothers to do to encourage their children.  Out there, without mother's supportive rah-rah for doing the best you can, the hard work should be, at least, equal to the result one puts out.

It's the same with movies, too.  In The Name Of Love of Star Cinema is a lot of hard work.  One year in the making, a new approach to storytelling (or so they claim) and a stellar cast, but was it good enough?

Exodus, my movie, was  a labor of love too.  So much hard work to put the movie together.  It was supposed to be this groundbreaking movie in its time(at least, that was THE plan).  But was it good enough?  No, it wasn't.  And there's no excuse for this.  My lesson there was, never work on something where the ambition is not equal to the resources given you.  Thus, the failure.

That's what a lot of people don't understand.  I've worked with so many effects and graphics artists and whenever I reject a work that they spent weeks creating, they all think that I am just trying to be difficult.  And that I don't appreciate any of the hard work they put into it.  They don't stop and ask, beyond their hard work, whether that week's work is good enough or not.  What they only see are the sleepless nights of working on it and that they should be appreciated for that alone.

People don't know what went on in the making of my bread pudding.  What they will only care about if they eat it, is that it should taste good.  People don't care about all  the fights we've had to get Exodus off the ground and finish it.  They only want to see if it's a good movie.

When one does a crappy commercial, no matter what toys you employ for camera work, no matter how many tests you do to make everything perfect, no matter how much number of frames you use to capture the moment of the dripping sauce in the bowl, if it's crappy, it will still be crappy.  All these maneuvers will not make it better.  Maybe less crappy, but not better.

When I look at the indie movies we have, the intentions are clear.  They want to tell a good story.  Passion and hard work, check!  But where it fails, in most of them, is in doing it right within the medium they chose.  If the actors can't act well, if there is not enough lights to illuminate the setting, if you can't execute the written page in visual cinematic terms either because of lack of budget or proper foundation,  if all you have to hold on to is this clever idea for a movie, then no amount of good intentions and hard work can compensate a half-baked result.

If I don't have enough eggs or have the right amount of cinnamon or not enough milk or cream to mix with the egg, or not enough heat or cooking time to finish it properly, no amount of well-meaning intentions for my bread pudding will make it better for those who eat it.

Execution is equal to intention.  Form is equal to substance.

And all these I learned just from baking that bread pudding.  Not bad, I suppose.

The Bread Pudding Lesson:  start with a worthy goal that you can put your heart into (bread pudding is a worthy piece of desert to eat, I think so), work hard to do it right and make sure you get it right (no if's, no but's).  When you get it right, only then will the blood, sweat and tears matter.