CEiMB: Cranberry French Toast Bake

This week's Craving Ellie in My Belly is from Liz of The Not So Skinny Kitchen. She chose for us to make Peach French Toast Bake from The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life by Ellie Krieger. Since I had a lot of cranberries left over from my Cranberry Orange Applesauce, and since cranberries are more in season than peaches, I decided to make my French toast bake with them instead.

I made a few additions and substitutions since I was using cranberries instead of peaches. Since cranberries are much tarter than peaches I added an additional tablespoon of brown sugar to the egg mixture and an additional 1 1/2 tablespoons of brown sugar to the cranberry topping. I substituted orange juice for the lemon juice in the recipe, and added the zest of half an orange to the egg mixture. Based on the reviews on the Food Network, I added some spices to the egg mixture as well. I added 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon and ground ginger, and 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg.

This dish was incredibly easy to throw together, and you can make it the night before, and bake it off in the morning for a quick breakfast. I actually only let mine rest in the refrigerator for about 4 hours, but that seemed to be plenty of time for the bread to soak up the egg mixture. My French toast took about 50 minutes to bake. The orange flavor went well with the tart cranberries, which were still quite tart, but when I drizzled maple syrup over the top, it was a nice combination of sweet and sour. This recipe is very versatile, I would like to try it with blueberries and almonds or plums and crystallized ginger. There are really a lot of combinations that would work well with the French toast, but I think it is really important to add a lot of flavors to the egg mixture or the French toast will probably come off as a little bland.