For those of you who love French toast, gingerbread, or simply caramelized flavors for breakfast or as a snack this one’s for you. Truly a delight.
French toast or as we call it in France ‘pain perdu’ is an absolute must for many. It is perfect for breakfast and dessert, often made for ourselves but that can very well be served to others.
With brioche, leftover bread, the soft bread crumb or even days old dried out bread, the recipes vary, for all tastes and flavors, a mix of egg and milk usually garnished with spices such as cinnamon or vanilla. For those with a sweet tooth I highly recommend trying out my brioche French toast with vanilla ice cream recipe.
For this recipe why not use a bread that already has a lot of flavor? Gingerbread is perfect for the occasion, it is a must try, easy and quick to make. You can try this recipe with store bought gingerbread or you can try my homemade gingerbread, a family recipe, to use in this recipe.
In this post
Information about the recipe
- The amount of time you should leave your gingerbread to soak in the egg-milk mixture depends on your gingerbread, how fresh and moist it is.
- For those with a sweet tooth you may wish to add a little brown sugar to the egg-milk preparation. This will help your bread to caramelize, my daughters live it, but personally I do not always add it as I find the gingerbread is sweet enough.
A second way to add sugar is to add it in the pan with the butter, it gives an even more caramelized result. delicious! - You may also try a lactose free version of this gingerbread French toast by replacing the milk with a plant based milk
- In this recipe I used a ration of 40cl of milk for 2 eggs. Use this as your reference point and adapt it slightly by increasing or decreasing depending on either the size of your bread slices or on the quantity of pain perdu you wish to make.
- In the photos you can see I have decided to serve my gingerbread French toast with some caramelized pears. To do so I first melted some butter, then added some brown or raw sugar which can also be replaced by muscovado sugar coconut sugar. Lastly add your slices of pear and let it slowly simmer and caramelize.
A little bit of history
For those of you who are curious and wish to find out about the incredible story behind gingerbread feel free to read my article where I go back to its Chinese origin, its arrival in France and eaten by monks, its pig shape sold on the markets after King Philippe de France fell of his horse…
The French words for French toast
In France we don’t call it French toast but pain perdu which literally means lost bread. Why? Because the original and traditional recipe began to be made with bread leftovers that started to harden and that we didn’t want to loose and throw away. A way to eat this hard bread was to soften it with this mix of milk and egg, and let it soak for a long time until bread is soft enough.
That’s how it began. And now very often French toasts are made with fresh bread or brioche (and even gingerbread or croissant sometimes!), but the this was not how it stared and what the traditional recipe is.
French toast with Gingerbread
Ingredients
- 8 slices gingerbread
- 400 ml milk
- 2 eggs
- 2 knobs butter
Optional
- 1 tblsp brown sugar or raw sugar, or muscovado sugar
Instructions
- Use leftover gingerbread, or if you do not have any make some gingerbread
Prepare the French toast
- In a bowl beat 2 eggs, add the milk and mix
- Soak your slices of gingerbread in the mixture for about 30 minutes
Cook the French toast
- Heat a pan and melt a generous knob of butter (you can use salted or unsalted butter)
- One the butter is melted, lay your slices of gingerbread in the pan and cook both sides until warm in the center and nicely caramelized on the outside
- Add butter between each batch made.
Notes
If you don’t have enough egg-milk batter, add more with the ration of 1 egg for 20pml milk.
Make sure to read the cooking notes in the articles to get more information.