Stuffed French Toast

Cream cheese and strawberry jam stuffed french toast topped with fresh strawberries

(recipe from Minimally Invasive)

This is what I made for breakfast one morning for a hungry group of nine at the beach house. D and I went out to pick up some missing ingredients, including the star of the show Challah bread, but the first supermarket that we went to had no Challah bread to offer! So we went across the street to the brand new Harris Teeter to try our luck. Oh, were we lucky. They had exactly two fresh loaves of Challah bread about to come out of the oven, so we wandered the aisles for a bit while the bakers prepared the steaming hot loaves for us. How heavenly it smelled during the car ride back... well, the blessing of fresh bread turned out to be a bit of a curse as well when it came time to make the french toast. Soaking the slices of Challah in the egg mixture made it soggy as hell. Cooking the french toast made the outside nice and golden brown, but when I cut a piece open, a soggy mess of cream cheese, jam, and bread. So, in a last ditch effort, I popped them in the oven to try to dry them out. Either it worked, which I'm pretty sure it did (at least for the piece I ate) or I was in very very polite company =) Lesson learned: let the Challah bread dry out a bit before making this recipe for soggy-free french toast!