Bread Pudding Disguised as French Toast

Spud 3 had a game night this weekend. That meant making pizza for a house full of hungry teenagers. It also meant figuring out what to feed them for breakfast -- a breakfast I wouldn't be there to prepare.

I know, cereal and donuts are always fine, assuming you have enough cereal or can send some one out for donuts, but the adult drivers were spread pretty thin so it was better to make do. Besides, when polled about breakfast (NOT my idea) the hungry monsters in the game room wanted pancakes. Ugh. I cannot make pancakes. Really. I can't. Let's not even go there.

I can make bread pudding. But if you call it bread pudding the monsters will revolt, or be revolted. If you call it French Toast they eat it up. So bread pudding... I mean french toast it was.


melt 1/4 cup butter in the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch glass baking dish. Slop the butter around so that it 'greases the sides of the dish. (I don't know why it has to be glass, but it does. Maybe I'll do the experiment some day.) Add 3/4 cup packed brown sugar. Stir until the sugar is mostly mixed in, but don't worry too much about it. Fill the dish with slices of bread. Use whatever you have. I sliced a bunch of ciabatta rolls into 3/4 inch slices and used those. You can stack or layer or slant or whatever you want. I needed it to look like french toast so I just put them in in a single layer. Whisk 6 eggs with 3/4 cup milk, 1 splash vanilla, 1 dash salt and a bunch of cinnamon. If you want to get technical it was about a tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt and about 1/2 tsp cinnamon. Pour over bread in dish. Cover. Refrigerate. This can be prepped at night and can sit until the monsters come out in the morning. As soon as you hear them starting to stir, Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Uncover dish and bake 30 - 40 minutes until the eggs are set and puffy. Serve with syrup, powdered sugar, milk and orange juice so you can tell their adults you TRIED to feed them something nutritious!

Definitely something I will keep in the kid recipe repertoire.

Sorry I don't have a picture. I was out driving spud one back to school and the scene in the kitchen when I returned wasn't pretty.