Happy Birthday, Us!

What are your plans, this July the 4th? We plan to be at the Dodgers game, eating junk food and watching our Boys in Blue. We’ll stay for the fireworks after the game of course, and hope we beat those crummy Astros, ha-ha! If you’re doing the BBQ thing at home, maybe you could bake a cake?

We got this one from Smitten Kitten, who adapted it from someone else pretty famous, which we then adapted again by adding blueberries. This type of easy baking cake is perfect for a toaster oven and doesn’t require a whole lot of skill, like me. Yes, that’s sugar sprinkled on top, but if you don’t like your desserts too sweet, like me, I don’t think you need this step.

One suggestion if you’re using a smaller toaster oven like the Zojirushi one, I would cover it with foil and monitor it a bit so it doesn’t burn. The smaller cavity tends to get hot, so be careful. Not a big deal and it’s a minor task in return for keeping the big oven available for something else.

Happy Birthday to Us! And I mean us, because yesterday was my birthday too. It’s true, I missed it by one day, but I’m still happy that everyone celebrates my birthday with fireworks!

So my wife said she wanted French Toast for breakfast, so go buy us some sausages. You don’t have to tell me twice to go get some unhealthy food for a change, LOL. But the first thing I did was bake some Brioche for the bread—after all, if we’re going to have French Toast, we need to do it right, right?

This breadmaker recipe is from Food.com, but I had to adapt it to reduce the ingredients from a 1.5 lb. loaf to my 1 lb. Zojirushi breadmaker. Here’s my scaled down recipe; add in this order into your breadmaker and use the white bread setting.

2 tbsp water (lukewarm)

3.5 tbsp milk (lukewarm)

2 eggs

0.5 tsp salt

2 cups flour

1-1/3 tbsp sugar

6 tbsp butter (softened)

1 tsp yeast

I can confirm that it worked. There’s an alarmingly amount of butter being used, but that’s what Brioche is.

As usual, I specifically hunted for a recipe that didn’t require rising or shaping the dough separately, and would bake it all in the breadmaker. I’m not going to be picky about bread that is destined for French Toast, but more on that later. As it was, this was an excellent buttery textured loaf that came out great.

French Toast in France is called pain perdu, which translates to “lost bread” because it’s usually made from stale bread that is already “lost”. It’s a great way to use stale bread of course, but it’s even better when it’s made from freshly baked Brioche bread.

BTW, if I haven’t mentioned this already in previous posts, the best way to use your Zojirushi griddle like this is to set it at 300 degrees. It’s the best temperature for cooking pancakes and this type of food slowly enough, yet hot enough to brown evenly. I mean, I love French Toast.

There is one more important day in July; National Eat Your Jello Day on July 12th. And even though it’s a contrived holiday by the famous gelatin maker, they still deserve their flowers for creating such a fun dessert. Do you know why hospitals give patients jello? It’s because it’s easily digestible, provides hydration and offers a source of calories for people recovering from illness. It’s often the first food they give you after surgery, so be sure to eat your jello!

To celebrate, I made a Japanese-American type of coffee jello that’s been around for ages and I don’t have a clue whose Auntie or Oba-chan first invented it. It’s different from the traditional “coffee jelly” that is so popular in Japan—the kind that you find in almost every coffee shop. I like that one too—if you want to make it you can find it on the Zojirushi recipe page.

This one starts with condensed milk for sweetening and a pot of strong dark roast coffee. You bloom the gelatin first, and mix to create the jello.

pouring condensed milk into jello mixture

I have the coffee maker from Zojirushi that I used, and if you want to read a little about the way it works you can see my past take on it here. For a 12-cup coffee maker it handles just 4 cups really well, which is unusual for a coffee maker this size. That’s an important detail!