Breakfast for Dinner - Maple Syrup Casserole

I was having A LOT of hesitation about this recipe.  It has no seasonings of any kind - just milk, eggs, maple syrup, cream cheese, and bread.  I thought that was pretty boring, so I threw in some cinnamon just for kicks and giggles.

I also didn't really want to make a HUGE pan of it for just myself, so I halved the recipe.

Now, my hesitation comes from the recipe itself, and because I didn't quite have half a loaf of french bread, but close - so I used what I had.  I also didn't have a smaller square pan, so I stuffed it into a round corningware dish.

The recipe says to lay out the bread, but a couple of teaspoon sized dollops of cream cheese on each piece of bread, repeat the layer, and then pour the egg mixture (milk, syrup, and eggs) over top of the bread, pouring carefully so that it didn't go over the sides.  That makes no sense to me!  It's liquid - it'll pretty much go where-ever it darn well feels like it.  So, I poured slowly so that the bread would have an opportunity to soak up a little of the mixture.

Refrigerate for 8 hours, or overnight.  I decided to do breakfast for supper - mostly because I have breakfast already taken care of with other groceries and because I had nothing else for supper.  So there.

I love breakfast for supper.  When I was a kid, my Mom would make pancakes and homemade syrup for supper.  It wasn't very often and we never had big breakfasts on the weekend, so maybe this was her way of making up for it?  Who knows.  I've never actually gotten the skinny on why she did breakfast for supper.  Maybe it was because it was just easy.

Anyway, back to the task at hand.

The recipe states to bake at 375 for 45 minutes - I actually ended up cooking it for like 1 hour 15 minutes and it could have even been in there longer.  My casserole dish was just the right size as the casserole puffed up a LOT - so much it even started to lift the lid off the dish!  While I was dishing it up, I wished that I had buttered the dish because the casserole was really stuck to it - it will be very fun to wash.

I'm glad I added the cinnamon, and wish that I had spreadable cream cheese because I would have like to spread it over the bread as opposed to dropping in on.  It tasted pretty good, but I don't think I would make it again - it was very sweet.  Not really something I'd serve for breakfast (plus, I already have a fantastic breakfast casserole recipe!).

Well - it wasn't a complete disaster, but it's definitely not something I'd make again.

This is the Cane Girl - signing off.