This week's CEiMB recipe was Blueberry Almond French Toast, hosted at Chez Zero. As you may gather from the post title, it's a baked French toast dish, and one where I left out two of the main ingredients--blueberries and almonds. Why would I do such a thing? Well, my husband doesn't care for almonds. Since raspberries were on sale, I swapped them out for blueberries. Sometimes, recipe tweaks are great. In this case, I should have stuck closer to the original.
Since there are only two of us, I sort of halved the recipe. I kept the bread, vanilla, and cinnamon amounts the same, but decreasing everything else.
Bread, meet egg/milk/etc. mixture
One thing I really liked about this recipe was that it was prepared the night before. It was especially helpful since I had quite a few loads of laundry to take care of the morning I made this.
After pouring the egg/milk/etc. mixture over the baguette pieces, I added some raspberries, covered the dish, and popped it in the fridge for the night.
The next morning, I put the French toast into the oven. Truthfully, I panicked that the cold glass dish would break apart in the hot oven, so I heated it up in the microwave at 30 second intervals to take the chill off. I wouldn't recommend it.
Since I was distracted by laundry (and thoughts of exploding glassware), I forgot to top my baked French toast with brown sugar until there were only about 15 minutes left.
I baked for about 50 minutes, then cut out some pieces to eat for breakfast.
It was okay. The raspberries' tartness was a bit overwhelming in the dish, so poor choice on my part there. I put in 1/3 cup of real maple syrup, but couldn't taste it at all. I'm not giving up on baked French toast just yet, but I may try making the actual recipes (blueberries, almonds and all) in the future.
Oh, I'm sorry this one didn't work out for you. :( I hope you do try it again, and that it works out better!
ReplyDeleteMy first thought was that the raspberries would have made a great french toast topping, but I can see where they may have been too tart. Still looks beautiful though!
ReplyDeleteYou know, despite all your reservations and little missteps (we all learn from trying and from others sharing their experience, so thanks for that!!), this looks really good to me. I love raspberries because they aren't so terribly sweet...this might be my favorite! :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind comments! I figure that playing around with recipes occasionally is a good way to learn.
ReplyDeleteWow, finally I have a partner in crime! It seemed like everybody in the group had huge success with this one except for me. Now that I've read your post, I feel a little better. I'm sorry that you didn't like it that much, though! I also would like to try it again.
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