So, a while back, my bro Nabsy (who has appeared in my blog FAR too often over the years) invited Kerri and I and MsEldest over for one of his favorite treats. Namely, Challah French Toast. I had never had challah before, but Nabsy explained that it was a lot like brioche, with which I am WELL acquainted (NOM!!).

We've had rather a trying couple of weeks, what with all our packing to head overseas, and thus I made the decision last weekend that I would spoil me/us as much as possible this week. None of this "no soft drinks they're bad for me", or "no, I shouldn't have another cigarette", etc etc. This week, in between copious amounts of packing and organizing, has been about indulgence. We've had too much caffeine, too many smokes, and hopefully far too much sugar. What we haven't had is any knock-down-drag-out stress fights.

WIN.

Today, we REALLY needed to get going again after a couple of days of very little progress. So, I decided to turn up the spoiling and make use of the brioche that I bought a couple of days ago, in hopes of getting us motivated. My normal cooking caper is to get a recipe off the internet and use it as a guide. In this case, however, I simply skimmed the contents of one recipe and jumped in head first (I've made french toast with normal bread thousands of times, just never tried doing it this way).  What follows is my own, very rough, recipe.

Brioche French Toast (ala, 4ft!)

Ingredients

1 Brioche Loaf, at least a day old (it's better if it's not fresh, takes the batter better and doesn't break up as much)
2 large, free range eggs (that's right, free range, otherwise it will taste like evil)
125ml Thickened Cream
125ml Milk (skim, full cream, who cares, you're mixing it with eggs and cream)
1/2tsp Vanilla Essence
Powdered Cinnamon to taste (I'd normally grind my own, but I was in a hurry today and used some pre-powdered. I'll address the quantity a little more thoroughly below)
Sugar to taste (I used a rough tablespoon for this quantity. Some people would use none at all. Remember, I'm spoiling here.)

Making the batter

Put the milk, cream, eggs, vanilla, sugar and cinnamon (everything but the bread, in other words) into a mixing bowl and beat  just enough to break up the yolks. Beating too much will dilute the cinnamon too much. This is where the cinnamon quantity comes in. You want it to look like the batter picture above, where there are still clearly some fair sized bits of yolk floating around in there, along with the clumps of cinnamon. You HAVE to be able to see those bits of cinnamon. If you have to, add a few more bits of cinnamon. In my experience, with french toast, it's very hard to have too much cinnamon.

Once the batter is ready, pour into a wide flattish dish for bread dunking. For brioche, you'll find you need something of a goodly size. You don't want to be bending the bread to get it in or out, otherwise it can fall apart quite easily. I use a glass pie pan, but a foil one would obviously work as well.

Slice the brioche nice and thick -- about 2cm. You'll want it to be hefty enough to hold itself together when it's full of batter, but not so thick that it doesn't cook through.

Then, the easy part: cook! I cook each slice on it's own. It's just easier that way. Dunk the slice in the batter, then, fairly quickly -- this will take some experimentation! -- turn it over, and then pop it straight into a hot buttered frypan (I use about medium heat on our gas stove). You don't want your pieces of french toast to be TOO soggy. Think of it like dunking cookies; wet, but not so wet that the cookie breaks off and winds up at the bottom of the glass of milk. An overdunked slice is a BITCH to turn, and winds up being soggy in the middle. Blurgh. Cook them as dark as you'd like them, or until they look a lot like medium dark toast (see pic!). Serve, with maple syrup (NOT maple FLAVORED syrup) and fruit, and revel in the complements!

That's pretty much it!

My personal touches, however, include:

• Adding a little -- less than half a teaspoon -- cinnamon on each slice before you turn it. Like I said: no such thing as too much cinnamon! Your tastes, and those of your audience/guinea pigs, may vary.
• Buttering each slice as soon as it comes out of the pan. Melty goodness. Need I say more?

This will take some experimentation to get right. But, it's entirely worthwhile. I'm lucky in that I actually enjoy the over-dunked slices, and other fuckups, because they're generally covered in hot butter, maple syrup and cinnamon. It's pretty hard to go wrong there.

Good luck, and happy eating! :)