Stuffed French Toast with Blueberry Sauce -- Random Recipe #9

Time for another Random Recipe from my cookbook collection.  This week I let me oldest son (who is 6) pick the book and flip to a recipe, he was excited to help :) He picked Taste of Home 1999 Annual Recipes from the bottom bookshelf. The bottom bookshelf is where I keep most of my annual recipes books, mainly Taste of Home, Southern Living, and Sunset.

I love Taste of Home and have enjoyed reading through the homey recipes for years. The annual recipe books are great because they are supposed to have every recipe from the past years magazines in one compact book. There were a bunch of recipes on the page my son flipped to so I had him close his eyes and point to one, lots of fun for a 6 year old, as I'm sure you can imagine. This is the recipe he landed on, Stuffed French Toast with Berry Sauce. My other two will be taking turns picking our Random Recipes as well in the future :)

French Toast is the least served of the breakfast carb trifecta (French toast, waffles, and pancakes) in our house.  We all love waffles, which are picky husband's favorite, so I make those often. Pancakes are so easy that they are a close second choice.  French toast always sounds good but the recipes are often hit or miss and I don't have a tried and true favorite.  Last month I made this White Milk Bread and ended up making French toast with it that turned out perfectly! I think a lot of it had to do with the dense bread, it doesn't sop up too much liquid and get mushy, and I have since decided this is my definite French Toast Bread recipe and whenever the need for French toast arises in the future, I will be baking this loaf.

Stuffed French Toast with Berry Sauce

adapted from Taste of Home 1999 Annual Recipes

*I followed the recipe when I made this but found out I needed to double the mixture to dip the bread in and also the blueberry topping. I am writing the ingredients as written so you may also need to double the milk/egg/vanilla and the Blueberry Sauce ingredients. Feel free to halve the recipe for four servings since one slice is plenty filling. The original recipes says 4-6 servings but I think it's more like 8.

Filling:

1 package 8 ounces cream cheese, softened

1 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon grated orange peel

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

French toast:

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

8 slices French bread (1 inch thick) I made a loaf this White Milk Bread and it was just enough 

Syrup:

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon cornstarch

1 and 1/2 cups frozen blueberries

In a mixing bowl, beat cream cheese, sugar, orange peel and cinnamon until smooth; set aside.

In a shallow bowl, combine eggs, milk, and vanilla. Cut a pocket in the crust of each slice of bread. Stuff each pocket with 1 - 2 tablespoons filling.  (This is a little tricky.)

Dip both sides of bread in egg mixture and pat down briefly sopping up some of the egg/milk/vanilla mixture. Fry on a greased (I did not grease mine since it's nonstick) hot griddle (I set my temperature to about 345) for 3-4 minutes on each side, or until golden brown.

For syrup (not sure why they are calling it syrup here when in the title it is Berry Sauce...), combine water, maple syrup, sugar, and cornstarch in a sauce pan. (I would make sure to use a little of the water to make a cornstarch slurry before adding it all together so it doesn't get lumpy). Bring to a boil; boil for 2 minutes or until thickened. Reduce heat; add blueberries. Simmer for 5-7 minutes or until berries are tender. Serve over French toast.

~~~

I dusted the French Toasts with powdered sugar, isn't that a must?

Here you can see the cream cheese middle.  Now personally I liked the cream cheese / orange combo but my youngest was not liking it much and I think that was because he was expecting the filling to be sweeter, but it really is more a basic cream cheese flavor and you get your sweetness from the blueberry sauce.  You could add some extra sugar to the filling, which I would probably do if making this for kids again.

The kids mostly enjoyed this, except my youngest not liking the filling. I loved it, especially the lovely blueberry maple sauce. Picky husband does not like blueberries or cream cheese so he did not have any, don't worry, I made him something different.  This was a fun recipe to try that I probably would not have made had it not been our Random Recipe for the week.  There are no photos of this recipe in the book so it kind of gets lost with the other recipes, some of which have photos.  The only little problem I had was the the French toast dipping mixture and the blueberry sauce definitely need to be doubled for this to work.  Now that I've found the perfect French Toast bread I am looking forward to making FT more often :)