Cooking Baking Eating

I’m strange. I admit it.

I like trying to make something that I have never ever tried. Most of the time I try to make something because its something my DH loves, but then its sometimes where I think “Mmmmm… this could be good…” and do it anyways.

A little bit of soul cooking, a little bit of curiosity, and a whole lot of making a mess. Examples of this include Mac and Cheese, Banana Pancakes, and Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas. Most of the time there isn’t much of a recipe, just going for it. Mac and Cheese had one mostly because I had never made a white sauce before. It was only loosely followed…

So I decided to do something strange, and stuff my french toast. I never had it before, but I was craving it.

I’m not normally the biggest fan of breakfast. I tend to like savory mornings where most of the morning foods I see seem to be sweet based. Normally I can’t handle that much sugar in the morning, so this was a strange craving to have.

The weather finally cooled down enough over the weekend that I was able to finally bake some more of my favorite bread. I’ve missed using my oven. It was like a part of me was missing.

That made me feel just a bit pathetic.

I used my handy dandy bread slicer to cut double thick slices. I figured that you can use two regular slices of bread to do the same function as one of the large ones. I just couldn’t get my mind around doing that and calling it “stuffed”. I needed a pocket to fill with cream cheese to make it feel… “authentic”.

It was a little difficult to make sure that I put the pocket in correctly, since my hands tend to be crooked when I slice, but you could see the knife going through the bread and feel it with your hands, so it wasn’t too hard.

Now there’s a pocket, what to do with it? Fill it with cream cheese! I decided to go the route of a sweetened cream cheese. I whipped up some room temperature cream cheese, vanilla and just a little sugar in my mixer and filled a pastry bag with it.

Do you need a pastry bag and fun shaped tip? Not really, a knife would have worked just as well, but I also just wanted to play with my pastry bags.

Make sure the cream cheese is room temperature, it makes it much easier to fill the bread.

Make sure to keep it as even as possible when putting it in. There were a few that had a whole bunch in the middle and it made it a little goopy when trying to eat it. Tasty but goopy.

I thought that we would each like to have two pieces for breakfast. I mean, we would have a platter of french toast at a resturant and it would have 2 big pieces on the plate which would disappear quickly. I didn’t take into account how filling these would be.

Now just cook as you would normally to make french toast. I cooked them a little longer on a little lower heat (just barley over medium) to make sure that all the egg that soaked into these huge pieces got cooked.

Good lord that’s a whole lot of food.

We then topped them with a little powdered sugar and fresh berries. I thought it needed something else and whipped up some fresh whipped cream to top it with, which was great! Next time I would make a berry sauce to go on top instead of just fresh berries. It needed a little sauce of some sort. Something slightly tart to go with the sweet cream cheese.

We each could only handle eating one of these, it was just too much food. One slice each should be sufficient.

Stuffed French Toast
Serves 4

• 4 thick bread slices or 8 regular bread slices
• 1/3 cup cream cheese
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1. Beat to combine the cream cheese, sugar and vanilla until light in color and fluffy.
2. If using thick slices of bread, slice a pocket in the side of the bread, going almost but not all the way through the other side of the bread.
3. Spread the cream cheese mixture evenly through the bread pockets. If using regular bread slices, spread the mixture evenly over half of the bread slices and top with the plain pieces.
4. In a wide dish, mix together the eggs, milk, cinnamon and nutmeg. Beat until all the mixture is incorporated and smooth.
5. Dip each serving of bread into the egg mixture on both sides quickly, then cook in a pan that is preheated to a little more than medium heat.
6. When the bottoms are golden brown, flip and continue cooking the other side.
7. Serve warm, topped with your favorite topping.