They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Here at Casa de la Vida we take that quite seriously! As many of you may have been able to see and follow, I post a photo of our breakfast / lunch table on Instagram almost every day. It is always a table full of goodies, as it should be!
Everyone in our house has their own taste. Luis has a sweet tooth, I prefer savory things and my father likes both. That doesn’t really matter at all, because what do you do when you have to have breakfast with the three of you? You put all kinds of tasty things on the table, of course! And that’s what we do, but sometimes we have something extra, like new recipes I’ve been working on, or my dad’s well-known and beloved crêpes on Sundays!
Today I thought, let’s share a new dish with you that I made for the first time in my life last week. First I have to explain how I came up with this idea: In 2008 my mother moved to Bahrain and I went to visit her. That is how I got to experience the culture there for a month, and of course the delicious (traditional but also modern) dishes!
One of them has always stayed with me: croissants in milk, eggs and a flavor in the oven. I had a booklet with the recipe in it, but I lost it in one of my many moves. I’ve always wanted to make it once and never really thought about it again until I had five croissants that were really inedible! So what do you do with those?
Milk, eggs, a bit of flavoring of some kind, put it in the oven and voilà, you’ve got a delicious breakfast ready on the table! But to make it even more fun, I thought I could use Luis’s favorite flavors, lemon and cinnamon. Of course I also owe this information to Luis’s parents, with whom I cook every week! They teach me the secrets of dishes from Murcia and of course the rest of Spain!
And of course I couldn’t wait to share this delicious dish, so roll up your sleeves! Let’s get started!
Ingredients
- 2 lemons for the zest
- 750 ml of milk
- 5 croissants
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 2 tablespoons of brown sugar
- butter
- 3 eggs
- apricot jam
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Put a pan on the fire and heat the milk with the zest of the lemons in it. Break the cinnamon sticks into pieces and add them to the milk along with the sugar. Stir well. Let it come to a boil for a moment, then turn off the heat to allow the mixture to cool.
Grease your baking dish with butter. I used a baking dish measuring 18 by 23 cm and about 7 cm high. Strain the mixture when it is cool. Add the 3 eggs and beat well. Cut the croissants in half, dip them in the egg-milk mixture and then place them in the baking dish.
Repeat this until all your croissants are finished, and make nice layers in the bowl. Pour the remaining egg-milk mixture over the croissants and put the bowl in the oven for 20 minutes. It is true that the bread will rise during baking. Open the oven after the 20 minutes and see if the dish is cooked. It may take another 10 minutes to go back into the oven. It’s a bit like a quiche, where you can’t always predict the right cooking time.
Remove the dish from the oven, spread a little apricot jam over it, and return the dish to the oven for a few minutes. Sprinkle a little brown sugar over it when it comes out of the oven and put it on the table immediately. Let everything cool down on the table and then serve it with a delicious cup of coffee and fresh fruit!
Voilà, a new way to still use your croissants!
The result
A delicious breakfast dish that you can easily make the day before! I actually secretly added the apricot jam because I had left the dish in the oven for too long because we were still building the set. But that was not a bad addition at all!
And believe me, once you make this you will definitely make it more often! I already have a few croissants at home that are not intended for anything else yet, so I have an inkling how I will get to use them!
The best thing is that a part of almost every dish of mine goes to my parents-in-law, and we often get a message late at night that the food was too tasty and they want more! And of course we don’t mind at all. I am so happy that I can let people enjoy good food in these weird times! Well that was the recipe for this week again. Don’t forget, friends, that a good breakfast is very important! And don’t you love the name I gave my dish?
See you again soon!
Of course I am curious about what you like to eat for breakfast, do you have a go to recipe? Would you like to share that with me? I love new discoveries in the food world!
