Tag: breakfast

Cinnamon French Toast

Posted on by Jasmina Brozović

On a cold winter Sunday, you sit in your spot and gaze outside to the fluffy snow falling over the ground while squirrels play catch.
It makes you crave something warm and sweet for breakfast, to help you match that fuzzy feeling you have inside.

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One of the best advantages of living in Canada is having the best maple syrup in the world always handy 🙂 (and if you don’t live in Canada, you can order it online. Ah, the perks of that future we live in…)
And the best way to enjoy it is with French Toast, especially with a touch of cinnamon.

Tools you need

You don’t need many tools for this dish and it’s fairly easy to make. You’ll still want to have some of these handy. It’s true things taste better when we work for them but why work harder than you need to?

  • Frying pan just makes frying things easy
  • Chef’s knife to cut the bread into sticks
  • Tongs are useful to flip the sticks over in a controlled way without chasing them around the pan with a fork or piercing the crust
  • Measuring spoons to, you know, measure things with them
  • Measuring cups. Sometimes when you buy measuring cups, measuring spoons come with them
  • Whisk to mix it all together in a small bowl or a plate

Ingredients

  • 8 slices of toast or any other white bread
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tbsp brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp vanilla extract
  • vegetable oil or unsalted butter for cooking
  • maple syrup for serving

Preparations

  1. Cut bread slices into sticks or leave them in one piece, whatever you prefer. Use old, drier bread if you can. It will soak better and won’t get doughy.
    Bread crust will give them a nice crunch, so don’t cut the crust off.
  2. In a bowl or a plate, whisk together the eggs, milk and vanilla extract. Dip each piece of bread in the egg mixture, turning to coat it on all sides so that it’s well-saturated with the mixture.
  3. In a separate bowl or plate mix cinnamon with sugar. Set aside for coating.
  4. Fry in a preheated frying pan with 2-3 tablespoons of oil on a medium heat.
    Watch out not to put too many pieces at once, they might stick to each other and loose their crispiness, which is no fun!
    Fry until golden brown.
  5. Coat the frying bread in a cinnamon mixture.
  6. Pour as much maple syrup as you like over the toast just before serving and enjoy!

Pro Tip: serve with maple syrup in a cup on the side and pour it over individual toasts to help them stay crispy.

Wrapping up

Now that you’re here there are two questions left.

  1. What do you like better, crispy sticks or slices with soft core?
  2. Other than maple syrup, what do you put on French Toast?

Bazlamača – Croatian Sweet Cornbread

Posted on by Jasmina Brozović

Old fashion, almost forgotten Croatian sweet cornbread was a typical Croatian breakfast over the centuries 🙂

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Croatian Northwest cuisine is based on breads, especially corn breads and all related dishes. This cake makes a great breakfast, which you can compliment with jam or fruit. Yum!

Bazlamača - Croatian Sweet Cornbread

Tools you need

  • Mixing bowls. Before you can put the ingredients into the baking sheet, you need to mix them somewhere. Mixing bowls to the rescue!
    Make sure bowls you use are adequately sized. There are few things worse than overflowing bowls.
  • Baking sheets come in different shapes and sizes and it’s good to have a variety available in your kitchen. I used 46 x 33 cm baking sheet which works very nicely with these amounts of ingredients.
  • Kitchen scale because baking is a fine art and perfection is a little bit more reachable when you quantify things
  • Turner spatula like the one in the photo above. You can eat with your hands if you can’t help yourself but it makes plating a lot easier, especially while Bazlamača is still hot
  • Kitchen mittens. Things get hot in the oven. Burns hurt and take time to heal. You don’t want to take time off from baking, do you?

Ingredients

Servings: 6-8 people

  • 250 g cottage cheese
  • 75 g sugar
  • 0.5 l of milk
  • a pinch of salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 0.5 l of sour cream
  • 150 g of corn flour
  • 150 g all purpose flour
  • 20 g baking powder

The traditional Croatian recipe (the way grandma used to make it) has much larger measurements since in the old days families were larger. But that’s another topic entirely 🙂

Preparation

  1. Mix both flours with salt and baking powder.
  2. In another bowl mix cottage cheese well with milk, sour cream, sugar, salt and eggs.
  3. Combine the two mixtures and mix until you get a smooth, medium thick batter.
  4. Grease the baking sheet. Pour the batter in and bake at 180 °C until golden brown.
  5. When the cake is done, allow it to cool slightly and cut as desired. Cake’s surface can additionally be sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Wrapping up

I like topping it off with different jams. Other options are honey, custard, maple syrup…

What do you think this would go well with?

Tell us in the comments bellow.

Cottage Cheese with Sour Cream – Sir i vrhnje

Posted on by Jasmina Brozović

In Croatia, we eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner 🙂

During the hot summer days, when it’s too warm to cook, “Sir i vrhnje” makes a great lunch. It’s quick to prepare and it tastes refreshing!

Cottage Cheese with Sour Cream - Sir i vrhnje

It is usually served with fresh vegetables (onions, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers…), cold cuts (ham, sausages, bacon, pancetta…), and fine bread (rolls, corn bread, whole grain bread, bread with seeds…).

To spice it up, add crushed canned sardines, chopped chives or spring onions, garlic, various fresh and dried herbs (dill, shallot, parsley, oregano…) and spices (red sweet and hot paprika, black pepper…).

With only two main ingredients, you can explore the tastes and enjoy one of Croatian all time favourites dishes.

Ingredients (4-6 people)

  • 400 g cottage cheese
  • 100 ml sour cream
  • 100 g spring onions
  • salt, pepper

You can replace sour cream with plain yogourt, if you want a less fat variation.

Preparation

Cut spring onions into rings, season with salt and add half to previously mixed cottage cheese and sour cream. Mix well, add pepper and salt to taste. Decorate with the remaining spring onions and enjoy!