Breakfast | Future Expat

Easy Breakfast Recipe: French Toast Casserole

Mar 2, 2014 | Bread-Muffins, Breakfast, My Recipes, Reader Favorites | 16 comments

I just love French toast and love bread pudding, so I knew when I stumbled on this French toast casserole recipe years ago that I would like it.

I’ve made this a number of times, modifying the ingredients and preparation instructions. While the original recipe, and most French toast or bread pudding recipes, tell you to use French bread, I’ve found that you can use whatever bread you have on hand as long as it can be cut into cubes. I always seem to have some frozen bread that is a bit past its prime that will work – hamburger buns, hoagie rolls…I’ve even used pita bread with this recipe!

I don’t think I would try this with thin sandwich bread slices, but anything else will probably work.

We’ve got another winter storm hitting St. Louis today, so I thought I would post this in honor of the 3 grocery items that the stores sell out of every time snow is predicted – milk, eggs and bread. It doesn’t take much else to make this recipe…so it’s the perfect comfort food for a cold winter morning.

MORE BREAKFAST RECIPES:

French Toast Casserole:

Ingredients:

5 cups bread cubes (French bread, buns, hoagie rolls or whatever you have on hand)
4 eggs
1 1/2 cup milk
4 tsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 tsp salt
cinnamon sugar mixture

Directions:

If your bread is frozen and you have planned ahead, let the bread defrost naturally. If not, cut it into cubes while it is still frozen and then microwave a few seconds until the bread is just barely defrosted.

Next, beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl.

Then add the milk, sugar, vanilla and salt and mix it up well.

Add the bread cubes to the bowl and push down all of the bread until it is all wet from the milk mixture.

Pour the mixture into an 8×8 baking dish or deep dish pie plate. Make sure you spray your dish first with cooking spray so the French toast doesn’t stick to the edges.

Sprinkle the bread with cinnamon sugar. The specs you see in this picture are actually cinnamon. I ran out of ground cinnamon and decided to make my own cinnamon from sticks.

Bake at 350° for 45 to 50 minutes or until a knife inserted comes out clean. When you take it out of the oven it will be all puffed up. As it sits for a few minutes, it will deflate pretty quickly.

Give it about 5 minutes and it’s ready to serve.

The first time I made this recipe was when my refrigerator broke. I needed a way to use up the frozen pita bread that had been sliced up to go with a dip and later tossed in the freezer. I wasn’t sure it it was going to work, but it actually turned out quite tasty even though I forgot to add the cinnamon sugar topping.