We are in full swing of the holiday season & my favorite holiday will be coming up this month, Christmas! I love this time of year! The holidays allow for us to take a step back from our every day lives, to reflect & enjoy what is most important, our families, friends & loved ones.

For me & my family cooking is a traditional part of the holidays. We spend the week before Christmas preparing cooking & baking for the Feast of the Seven fishes on Christmas Eve, then another big dinner on Christmas day. Needless to say its a lot of food for two-3 days, but thats just what we enjoy doing, sitting around the table together, catching up eating, drinking, laughing & crying!

Food is a way of life in the south, and looking at southern cookbooks, magazines, and television shows, one could easily assume our favorite part of the meal is dessert. From church pot-luck suppers, to office holiday parties, to a night out with friends, desserts are always plentiful. It’s also fairly easy to sneak a little whiskey into your dessert recipe.

The recipe I’m sharing today is inspired by Chef Ed Lee, of 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky. I started with Chef Lee’s recipes for Sweet Potato Cornbread Pudding and Bourbon Sauce, but then messed with it a bit, because I can’t leave well enough alone. This recipe is broken into 4 steps; cornbread, sweet potatoes, custard, and sauce. If you’re like me and like to make cornbread regularly, this is a great way to use leftovers, and also save a little time when building the dish. Instead of the traditional, cloyingly sweet bread pudding, you end up with a dish that contrasts sweet and savory, and would make as good a breakfast as it would dessert.

Since the bourbon trend has been popular over the last several years, increasingly, bourbon is being infused into food culture as an ingredient. Living in Portland, Oregon, eating and drinking is serious business and taken to the highest art form. Bourbon is no longer regaled as just an ingredient in barbecue sauce, but can now be found in everything from ice cream to pickles. Therefore, I set out to sample some of these bourbon infused/inspired foods to see if they are worth a try, or simply a marketing gimmick to make money off the hot trend of bourbon?