Sweet of the Week: Cinnamon Roll Bread Pudding at The Bentley Tavern

As an avid dessert-lover, I occasionally find myself indecisive. Do I want cheesecake? Do I want bread pudding? Do I want something a little more pastry-heavy? Killing a whole flock of birds with one saccharine stone, The Bentley Tavern grants my gluttonous wishes with one killer dessert medley. The quintessential confection for the indecisive sugar fiend, The Bentley Tavern serves cinnamon roll bread pudding with hibiscus-flecked cheesecake. I applaud the gumption of pairing one dessert with another, like serving cake with a side of pie, and stuffing the cake full of cinnamon rolls. Dreamy.

(Cinnamon roll bread pudding + cheesecake at The Bentley Tavern)

The crux of the dessert is the bread pudding, something I usually bemoan for its boring trappings. Too often, bread pudding is a lazy afterthought, drizzled with cloying sauces and plopped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. About as riveting as a late-night infomercial. But what The Bentley Tavern does with bread pudding is truly inventive. The restaurant makes cinnamon rolls for brunch, reserving the leftovers instead of throwing them out (it's the green thing to do), and reconstituting them as bread pudding. It's at once resourceful and ingenious, and I'd argue that cinnamon roll bread pudding is wildly more delicious then their original iteration. I'd mostly chock that up to the sublime texture on the pudding, far silkier and more luscious than any breakfast pastry I've had. Basically, the whole thing is like the buttery, doughy innards of a cinnamon roll, which is the best part after all. Everything else is just foreplay. The pudding tastes like the cereal milk left over from a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which is about as good as anything cinnamon-y can hope to get. Oh and then there's basically a second dessert on the elongated plate. Once you're done shoveling bread pudding into your mouth, refresh yourself with tangy cheesecake. Far more elegant and dainty than cookie-cutter slabs of cheesecake, The Bentley Tavern's version is more of a free-form mousse-y quenelle. Let's get real, this dessert is essentially an excuse to eat cream cheese frosting by the spoonful and feel normal about it. I appreciate that very much, and I enjoy the airy lightness, especially considering the cinnamon roll bread pudding that preceded it seconds prior.