I actually read ahead for this week's French Fridays with Dorie and knew that I needed to make challah. OK, I am sure that I could have bought challah, but I love making challah. I love the way that it makes my kitchen smell, and how it feels when you braid it. And youtube is filled with wonderful examples of bread braiding.
I had never made challah before I baked along with the group of bakers making the breads in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. As with any bread that you have grown up on, there was some discussion on which challah was the favorite challah. A couple of the bakers preferred a recipe a book called in the Second Helpings Please, put out by the Mt. Sinai Chapter of Montreal of the Jewish Women's International of Canada in 1968. GrongarBlog recently posted a most beautiful post on this challah recipe. The pictures alone will make you run to make a loaf.
Early into the process, my camera died. The battery will not accept a charge. It will take a little investigating to see how serious a situation this is but I had my cell phone.
The challah was sliced and dipped into a combination of eggs, milk and sugar and cooked in some butter in a griddle. French Toast.
The french toast soaked in eggy custard of eggs, sugar, vanilla, milk. We were supposed to add some dried fruit. Adding dried fruit would guarantee that I would be the only one eating this. So, I added some strawberries and bananas and a touch of cinnamon and put it into a water bath to bake.
We served this with a little whipped cream and everyone loved it. I think it would have been too sweet for us to eat for breakfast.
Murphy was quite excited by all the egg cracking that went into this recipe. Eggs for challah, eggs to brush the challah, eggs to make the french toast, eggs to make the custard. A definite egg fest, perhaps I shared with the hopeful puppy.
