Apples and honey stuffed french toast
/Even if you aren’t celebrating Rosh Hashanah, apples and honey are a superb combo and mixed with cream cheese and stuffed into buttery challah French toast? **Chef’s kiss**
You could absolutely eat this French toast for a special holiday breakfast, but I love a breakfast-for-dinner situation and holidays with breakfast-for-dinner foods are especially fun, no? Also, might I add, this fancy-seeming French toast is extremely easy to whip up for a Yom Kippur break fast in a few days.
Apples and honey stuffed french toast
Time: About 20 minutes
Yield: 3-4 extra large slices
Adapted from this stuffed french toast recipe
Leftover challah (Cut into 3-4 very thick slices)
4 eggs
½ cup milk
½ tsp cinnamon (heaping)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp butter (for the pan)
Stuffing
3-4 oz cream cheese
2 Tbsp unsweetened apple sauce
2-3 tsp honey
1 small apple, chopped into very small pieces (about 1/3 of a cup)
Large pinch of salt
To make the stuffing, combine the softened cream cheese, apple sauce, honey, and salt. Put the cream cheese mixture into a plastic bag or piping bag and put in the fridge until needed.
Starting at the top crust, make a cut down the middle of each thick bread piece but stop an inch from each side and the bottom to create a pocket in each slice. Cut enough so that you can get some filling into the pocket, but leave enough room around the edges that the bread won't break and spill the filling.
In a frying pan, melt 1 Tbsp of butter on low heat.
In a separate container, whisk together the eggs, milk, cinnamon, and vanilla.
Take out your bag of cream cheese mixture and cut one bottom corner to make a piping bag. Open each slice of bread and fill with about 2-3 Tbsp of cream cheese mixture. Squish the bread and filling together a bit.
Working with one slice at a time, dunk both sides in the egg mixture and let the bread soak in the liquid. When the pan is hot, cook the bread slices until golden brown. Flip and repeat until golden brown on both sides.
Serve immediately with a drizzle of honey on top.
A couple of recipe notes:
If you need/want to sub whipped cream cheese for regular cream cheese, omit the apple sauce in the filling and add a little bit of extra honey. Whipped cream cheese is much thinner and wetter, so you don’t need the apple sauce to thin out the mixture.
Once you’ve filled your bread, give it a little squeeze to ensure that the mixture stays inside.
Feel free to increase the egg mixture. Once you’ve dipped all of your bread slices, the leftover eggs can be cooked like regular scrambled eggs for a sweet, cinnamon-y egg-y treat.