Brunch Date (Cranberry Wild Rice French Toast)

This last weekend was very low-key in Casa Swan.  Lots of laundry was washed and dried, but I didn't put any of it away, so now that I'm home with Colter on a rare "sick day" I will end up folding towels and trying to clean out laundry baskets, all while watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent on Netflix.  I love L&O:CI, everything about it makes me happy, from Vincent D'Onofrio's genius Detective Goren to the plot synopsis of each crime and it's conclusion.  I can't wait to get to work on folding when I have Detective Goren to keep me company.

Yesterday I invited some pals over for brunch, a couple folks that I haven't seen in a while but enjoy spending time with, so brunch seemed the best way to lure them to my house for a visit.  Thank you, Tanya and Matthew, for your willingness to be my culinary guinea pigs!

I was feeling inspired, and decided to put the inspiration to good use by making something I saw on Drive-ins, Diners and Dives a long time ago, Cranberry Wild Rice French Toast.  There is a little cafe in Minnesota that makes their bread special for this French Toast, using native Minnesotian wild rice and cranberries, and it looked super good.  I'm happy to report, it is just as delicious as it looks above (the top is flat from brushing melted butter on the loaf before baking, an unnecessary step I don't plan to repeat).

The bread dough was incredibly simple to make.  So simple, in fact, that I threw a second batch of the ingredients into the bread machine after brunch and made something doubly delicious with the second batch of bread dough as well.  The longest part of the bread dough prep process: getting wild rice ready.  Fifty minutes to cook, but if you cook quite a bit you can make enough for 2-3 batches of this bread at once.

Once the bread was baked and ready to go you slice it up and then dip the slices in your French Toast ingredients and then let the slices set on a rack to wick away some of the additional egg/milk mixture.  This is where I feel I have been failing on my attempts at French Toast.  You really have to let the slices dry a smidge, otherwise you get really soggy results.  I ended up having a little egg nog in the fridge from the holidays that was still good, so I used this for the egg/milk mixture, and you totally could tell there was a little extra "something" from the spices in the egg nog.  Totally delish.

Brioche

I made a loaf of French Brioche bread dough in the bread machine as well, and this loaf was GORGEOUS, and the first few slices were like heaven, but the inside was just a little doughy at the very top, so it didn't end up making very much French Toast.  But I have made French Toast before with this brioche bread, and I 100% recommend trying it.  Super easy to make, and the results are like a loaf of croissant: light, flaky and rich as hell.  Or like Kim Kardashian (HEY-OH!).

I served this French Toast with baked bacon and turkey bacon I baked in the leftover real bacon grease, which removed all the health properties of turkey bacon.  I will share with you the next use for the Cranberry Wild Rice bread in my next post.... you will LOVE it!