marmalade bread and butter pudding

Another hit from the party. Personally, I found this stuff overwhelmingly sweet, but a lot of people told me they loved it, so maybe you'd like to try it out! From Donna Hay. The photo is of the pudding pre-baking, and I probably won't make it again and take another one, so go to the original recipe to see what it's supposed to look like.

several sticks softened butter
8 thick slices of soft-crusted white bread
1 cup marmalade
2 cups milk
1 cup cream
3 eggs
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped (save seeds)
1/4 cup currants
2 tablespoons Demerara sugar

Preheat oven to 320ºF. Butter the bread slices, spread half with marmalade and combine to form sandwiches.  Cut them in half and arrange crust-down in a small, deep baking dish.

Whisk the milk, cream, eggs, caster sugar, and vanilla bean seeds in a big bowl. Stir in the currants and pour over the bread until the dish is mostly full. Stick the vanilla bean into the middle, near the top but in the liquid. Let the pudding soak for a couple minutes. In the meantime, boil a pot of water. 

Pour in more of the milk mixture if there's space/you have some left. Sprinkle the Demerara sugar over everything. Place the baking dish into a larger, similarly deep ovenproof pan, place on oven rack, and fill larger pan with the boiling water halfway up the side of the smaller dish. Bake for an hour or until the pudding has just set.

 Make sure your baking dishes fit together okay before you make this! (Note: the ones shown are not ideal, there should be more space between the pans on the long sides.)

The 'broth.' The number of puddings we made for that party required about two gallons of it.

I'd like to see what happens if I make this with wheat bread and a less sweet jelly than the marmalade (maybe the lingonberry one from Ikea?) and some tweaks to the broth, because it's a cool idea but the flavor is just so sugary it's hard for me to enjoy.