New Mom Starting From Scratch: Buttermilk French Toast with Crispix Cereal Crust

My little Cupcake is a finicky eater, as I am sure many other parents can identify to when you have had a toddler. Trying to figure out what food they will eat that day is a challenge! However I do see patterns in my Cupcake. She loves things with a nice crunch! She would eat an entire bag of tortilla chips with salsa if you let her. If I give my daughter cereal she likes it crispy, not soggy. Unlike me, I LOVE to let my cheerios sit in milk and soak up the milk and get that chewy texture (by the way the ONLY cereal I will do this with). I have a cereal addiction, I always buy boxes and boxes of cereal, and strangely they don't always get eaten entirely, but I will keep buying more boxes. Mr.Tasteful rather I stop and wait until a box is finished, completely understandable!

Anyway, I found myself with 7 boxes of cereal in my pantry. I was going to make my Cupcake some breakfast, but I did not want to give her another bowl of cereal and milk. I was craving french toast, so I thought "why not make a crusted french toast?". Now I just had to figure out what type of cereal I would use. I looked through all my cereal and I determined the Crispix cereal would be the nice crunch I need for the french toast. After all is done once I served to my Cupcake she almost ate the entire slice of french toast, which for her was a HUGE deal because normally she would only eat a couple bites of regular french toast. But I think this crunchy texture is what added to her desire to eat more of the french toast.

You can use any custard you like for your french toast, I have a few different types. Sometimes I like to add fresh squeezed orange juice to my mixture, or grated orange zest. But for this recipe I am just going to give a basic custard that can be adapted to your taste. Well I guess its not basic because I do use Buttermilk, but instead of Buttermilk you can just use any kind of milk you desire. The type of milk will just create a different richness to your custard.

3 eggs
1/8 cup of Half & Half cream
1/8 cup of Buttermilk
1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
6 slices of buttermilk bread (you can use any type of bread and you may be able to get more slices of bread depending on the size of the slice)
3 cups of Crispix Cereal
Cinnamon (based on your liking)
Butter
Powder Sugar

In a pie dish or any other container that has sides and is large enough for slices of bread to fit, mix together 3eggs, cream, buttermilk and vanilla until whipped nicely together.

In a separate plate take 1 cup of cereal at a time and crush with your hands until broken into smaller pieces.

Quickly dip one slice of bread at a time on both sides into custard batter, personally I do not like to let my bread soak, unless it was a hard stale bread, then I would let is soak a little. But I find that when I soak a regular slice of bread it becomes to soggy and falls apart easier when transferring into pan. I actually did try both ways with this bread and preferred not to let this bread soak, so just keep that in mind for yourself. Also do not dip all the bread into the batter all at once, only make one or two slices at a time or however many slices you are able to cook at once (if you have a griddle and can fit up to six slices that be perfect). Also the reason I only crushed one cup of the cereal at a time was because I found after I dipped the bread into the cereal it got wet, so I didn't want any of the cereal still on plate for the other bread to get soggy.

Preheat your pan, you can use a non-stick skillet or a cast iron pan (like I did). Place on a low to med heat. Make sure your pan doesn't start to smoke, if it does take off burner and let it cool down for a min, because you don't want your butter to burn.

Once your bread is dipped with batter take bread and smash into the Crispix cereal, and then lightly dust both sides with cinnamon.

Place a pad of butter into your per-heated pan, let it melt then place your coated bread into pan, let simmer on the low-medium heat for about 5 min on both sides. After you flip the bread place another pad of butter into pan and cook for another 3-5 minutes.