Cooking with Caja
The Owner of Caja Caliente Shares Her Restaurant’s Recipes
Another month has gone by without our weekend brunch routine. But with restaurants, bars and even cruise lines sharing their signature food and cocktail recipes, we can almost pretend that everything about this situation is anything but normal. Mika Leon, the owner of Caja Caliente, is one of those sharing souls. She posted a video on Caja’s Facebook page of her cooking their signature French toast. So, I made my own. Here’s the recipe and how it turned out.
Ingredients:
- Brioche or challah bread
- 2 eggs
- ¾ cup milk
- 2 Tbs. sugar
- Cinnamon (to taste)
- 1/3 cup Cuban coffee
- Vanilla extract (to taste)
- Frosted Flakes
Directions:
- Leave the bread out either the night before or a few hours before cooking it, so it gets stale and hardens.
- Make Cuban coffee and let cool before adding it to the batter.
- Put the Frosted Flakes in a Ziploc bag and crush with a rolling pin until it’s a powdery texture. Pour it out onto a flat plate.
- Combine the eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, coffee and vanilla in a bowl and mix together.
- Poke holes in the bread with a toothpick and dunk in the batter. Don’t soak the bread because you don’t want it to be soggy. Then dip either side of the bread onto the plate of cereal and cook on low heat until slightly brown.
Thank you, Mika, for sharing this recipe. I will never be able to eat regular French toast again. As much fun as I had eating it, I enjoyed making it even more. The recipe itself is simple. The part that took the longest was getting the cereal to the right consistency – though there’s something therapeutic about smashing a defenseless bag of Frosted Flakes. We filled a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag with the sugar-coated cereal, and that was enough to cover six slices of brioche.
The batter was enough for about eight slices, so plan accordingly. The cereal crust did make it a little difficult to tell when it was cooked, as you can usually go by the color of the bread. But a few minutes on each side did the trick. All that’s left to do is to dig in. The flavors in the batter complement each other so nicely that nothing is overpowering. Even non-coffee drinkers will love this dish. And while you’d think that restaurants sharing their recipes would put them out of business, food always tastes better when someone else makes it for you.
