What did you get for breakfast today? I got French toast. French Toast Cupcakes that is.
French Toast Cupcakes
I had amazing French toast at the Blue Fox Café in Victoria, BC last year when I was winding down from a skiing trip to Canada. Orange, pecan and cinnamon – with amazing house made sour cream sauce. My French Toast Cupcakes are an attempt to revisit that breakfast.
French Toast Cupcakes
These cupcakes are basically “bread and butter cake” – though why they call it this is beyond me because I, at least, have never put any butter on the bread. It’s basically made of pieces (sliced or chunked) of bread (or croissant, panettone, unfortunately destroyed (say by forgetting to grease the tin and it breaking when you go to turn it out) cake), combined with an uncooked egg custard. Other items such as dried fruit, bits of chocolate, raspberries etc. are optionally layered in there too. At Zarbo, a café/deli in Newmarket, Auckland, NZ, where I used to work, we made bread and butter cake with our soon-to-pass-sell-by-date gourmet chocolates. Yum.
French Toast Cupcakes
So here we go, on day 21 (Topless Thursday). Orange and pecan French Toast Cupcakes with a surprise orange sour cream centre.
French Toast Cupcakes
French Toast Cupcakes
Makes 12
ingredients
12 cups day-old sourdough bread, cut into 1-1.5 cm cubes
4 eggs
1/3 cup sugar
juice and zest of one large orange
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
500mL milk
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tsp sugar, extra
2 tbsp caster sugar, for the topping
1/2 cup chopped pecans, for the topping
mixing
Line a 12 hole muffin pan with cupcake cases, spray well with non-stick spray.
Place the bread cubes into a large bowl. Zest the orange, then squeeze the juice into a small bowl, reserve the juice. In a jug, whisk the eggs sugar, half the orange zest, cinnamon, vanilla, and all of the orange juice. Pour in the milk and whisk together.
Pour the egg mixture over the bread cubes and toss gently using salad tossers (or your hands) until all the cubes are soaked through with the egg mixture. Spoon into the cupcake cases, and mound the tops. Pour any remaining egg mixture evenly over each cupcake, and let them sit for five minutes or so.
Mix the sour cream, extra sugar and the remaining orange zest in a small bowl. Load this into a piping bag fitted with a narrow nozzle – you’ll be injecting this into the cupcakes. Insert the nozzle halfway into the cupcake (between bread cubes!) and squeeze gently, to dispense about 10mL of filling. You’ll see the cupcake expand a little when the filling goes in. If you like, practice what a squeeze of the filling feels like by squirting a walnut size blob back into the mixing bowl before you start on the cupcakes (you can scoop your test blobs back into the piping bag at the end!).
Sprinkle the cupcakes evenly with the caster sugar (about half a teaspoon per cupcake) and the pecans. Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes or until the custard is set. Serve warm or cold.
French Toast Cupcakes
These would make a perfect do-ahead brunch food – assemble them the night before and bake in the morning!
Enjoy!xxx
One comment