Crème Brûlée French Toast

Week 6  (February 10, 2010 make-up)
The past couple of Wednesday's have been busy for us, so we've had to "make-up" our new recipe night. I decided to try out a recipe for a new breakfast item since breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. And, because it was Valentine's Day weekend, I chose something sweet and decided to try a new french toast recipe.

The lucky recipe: Crème Brûlée French Toast! Doesn't that sound divine??! It combines two of my favorite things-- crème brûlée and french toast. How could this recipe go wrong? (spoiler alert: it doesn't!)

I ran into 2 hurdles with this one. First, I wanted to use a fresh baked brioche from my favorite patisserie, Patisserie Phillipe, but when I dropped by on Saturday they were sold out. I was able to get a loaf on the next day, which also happened to be Valentine's Day.

The second hurdle was that the recipe called for an overnight soak and since I wanted to make this for Valentine's Day breakfast, I didn't have enough time. I contemplated forgoing the overnight soak, but decided to delay Valentine's Day breakfast for the next day and not skip the step.

Alterations to the recipe: I decided that 1 cup of brown sugar and 1 stick of butter was *too* much sugar and butter for 2 people so I halved that part of the recipe and eliminated the corn syrup. I also reduced the half and half to 1 cup. Next, I didn't have Grand Marnier so I substituted it with Cointreau (still orange based). I used a different type of bread and did not cut off the crusts. And finally, I added a few dashes of cinnamon.

The Crème Brûlée French Toast came out DELICIOUS! It was such an easy recipe and would be great for a brunch party or for when you have overnight guests. Our rating for this recipe was 8.5 (Mayra: 8, Geoffrey: 9*).

*Geoffrey later mentioned to me that he would have rated it a 10, but after I mentioned that the topping was made of only brown sugar and butter, he got disgusted and "could only taste the butter" thereafter. I only tasted the caramely deliciousness!