Adapted from Marmiton

I am living here in Southern California for nearly two years now. The weather has definitely been a blast coming from Europe, where fall and winter tend to be fairly grey, wet and cold (oh and long too!). I can say that I experience a sort of endless summer in Orange County. It is nice not to put on 55 layers before getting out in the morning or to constantly have cold feet. But I have to say, sometime I do miss the colder days. The stay-under-your-duvet-days where there is literally nothing better than being lazy at home with tons of tea, books and fun TV shows. However, since yesterday, a bad weather period has started (it will remain until tomorrow, only! Don’t forget we are in Southern California after all!). Yesterday, I heard the rain and the wind outside when I woke up, and really enjoyed to have a bit of a fall atmosphere. This morning, it was still not that inviting out there. It made me want to have a delicious cold-days-breakfast: French toast! When your days start at 25 degrees °C (77°F) you really don’t crave this food. But since today it was a touch colder it was perfect to do so.

I discovered French Toast years back, when living in Canada. I did find it interesting that they called it French Toast and that it could be found on a restaurant menu. In France, you call it “Pain Perdu”, “Lost Bread”. You usually use old bread, so really nothing fancy about it. In Germany, it is pretty similar: “Armer Ritter”, “Poor Knight”. Food for the poor since it just requires basic ingredients such a bread, eggs and milk.

Since French Toast is not on my daily menu, I decided to make it a bit more fancy and pimped it up with chocolate, cinnamon and ginger.

Enough talking! Now let’s focus on the quick and delicious recipe!

Makes: 3 large toast slices
Difficulty: Easy
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Baking Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

• 3 Slices of toast bread (or any other bread which soaks up well liquid)
• 1 egg
• 50 ml/ 1/4 cup Milk
• 50 ml/ 1/4 cup Liquid Cream (if you want to keep it lighter just replace it by milk as well)
• 1 and 1/2 tbsp Sugar
• 1 tbsp Cocoa (or to taste!)
• 1 tsp Ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp Ground ginger
• Butter for the pan

Method:

Mix in a deep plate the egg, milk, liquid cream, spices, sugar and cocoa. Mix well.

Put a little bit of butter in a pan and let it heat up.

Dip the bread slices in the plate with the milk-egg mixture. Make sure that all the slices are well soaked up with the liquid.

Fry (on medium heat) the bread slices until they are crunchy and golden.