Crunchy French Toast and Triple Decker Sandwich

My niece came to our place for a sleep over this weekend and I wanted to solidify my place as the cool aunt. So we watched Dora way past her bedtime, had cookies and lemonade in bed and slept late into the Saturday. Sometime during 2 in the morning, she started missing her mom and woke up howling, so I had to stay up for an hour comforting her. Man, toddlers are tough customers , you simply can't reason with them. It took a lot of cajoling, pleading and threatening to get her back to bed. She finally fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion. And the hubby and I heaved a huge sigh of relief that we don't have kids....yet :)


And when she woke up in the morning, she was all giggles and sunshine as if none of this ever happened. Anyway, I wanted to cook her special breakfast and I ended up making these crunchy french toasts that I remembered reading about on FoodMayhem. I made the hubby a sandwich because he doesn't like sweet so early in the morning! Weird guy!

Crunchy French Toast

2-3 pieces of bread, preferably old
2 eggs
2-3 tablespoons heavy cream/ milk
2 teaspoons of light brown sugar
2 drops of vanilla essence
1 pinch of cinnamon powder
1 handful of assorted nuts and granola
1 tablespoon of honey and more brown sugar

Beat the eggs is shallow pan with the cream, brown sugar, vanilla and cinnamon powder. Soak the bread in the eggs for 15-20 mins. Lay flat on a baking sheet.
Mix the assorted nuts together. I used almonds, pecans and walnuts because that's usually what I have have at home. You can use whatever mixture you like. I bet cashews would taste fantastic with this! Roughly chop the nuts and the granola and toss with honey and brown sugar. Spoon the mixture on top of the soaked bread. Bake in an 350 degree oven till the bread firms up and the top becomes golden. I topped this with homemade blueberry sauce. I just boiled together blueberries with sugar and water till it thickened and resembled a jelly. The toast was perfectly soft on the inside and the nutty topping was crunchy and yummy. This is definitely decadent enough to be Sunday brunch.



Triple Decker Sandwich

3 pieces of bread
1 egg
1 teaspoon coriander chutney
1 teaspoon ketchup
1 teaspoon hot sauce
1 teaspoon pepper jelly
1 slice of cheese
1 scoop of spicy mashed potato
butter

Beat the egg, season with salt and pepper and fry it on both sides and keep aside. Take one piece of bread, toast it lightly on both sides. This will be the middle part of the sandwich. Lay down a piece of bread, butter it, put a layer of pepper jelly, cheese and mashed potato. Top with hot sauce. Put the previously toasted bread slice on top. Then put some coriander chutney and fried egg. On the last slice smear some ketchup and hot sauce and lay on top of the egg. Toast it on both sides till you see the cheese melting. Press down slightly while toasting with the help on another pan. This is a ridiculously easy sandwich, almost everything you need is in the pantry and you can easily substitute whatever you don't have with other things. There are a lot of flavors and textures going on which makes it very filling.
The best part was the cooking time for both these things wasn't more than 20 mins, leaving me with plenty of time to watch more Dora with my niece. On the flipside though, I've become allergic to D..D..D..Dora song.