While I am editing the backlog of oatmeal photos, I thought I would leave you this lovely recipe for baked french toast. My cousins, Tony and Alex, (great guys who will forever be kids in my book, even though they're teenagers) gave me this recipe for my wedding shower. I should explain.

My mom was wonderful enough to petition all the people we know, (and some we don't), for recipes to give me for my wedding in a recipe box, to get me started cooking for two. Tony and Alex submitted this recipe for that.

Anyway...I hadn't tried it yet because it's a huge recipe for two people. For some reason, it never occured to me to halve the recipe, but I tried that this week, and it worked wonderfully. We had it for dinner, but it could be served for breakfast, brunch, lunch....you get the idea.

Baked French Toast

Ingredients:

6 T. butter

1/2 c. maple syrup

1/4 c. brown sugar

8 slices bread (or texas toast)

7 eggs

4 T. milk

1/2 t. vanilla

fresh fruit (optional)

Directions:

Combine butter, sugar, and syrup in a 9x13" pan. Set in a 375° oven to melt. Add one layer of bread, pushing bread together tightly. Beat eggs, milk and vanilla, pour over bread.

Bake 15 to 20 minutes at 375° (or until bread is firm). Remove toast onto plate by flipping over so glazed side is up.

Serve with fresh fruit.

Above the full recipe is listed. From the pictures above you can see I halved this and used an 8x8 pan, and it worked fine, though I did have to really wedge the bread in. I used 4 eggs, and frozen fruit, thawed, but otherwise, the recipe halved 'as is'.

Note: Torn up bread works wonderfully for this recipe, and fits better in the pan. Just be sure that it is in single layer, as anything piled atop will be dry.