Bonjour, nom-in-a-hole

I had tried to make egg-in-a-hole before.  I love eggs over easy.  I love toast.  Why not try the recipe that brings them together, no?  But I could never get it right.  It never tasted as good as it did separately, so I was beginning to think maybe I just didn't like them combined.

(Famously - in our family, at least - my dad likes peanut butter and he likes jelly but he dislikes them together, so no PB&J sandwiches for him.  So it wasn't absurd to me that perhaps eggs and toast were delicious separately but perhaps never were the twain to meet.)

But then I tried Ree's.  And I saw all the little things I was doing wrong.  And all became right with my breakfast world.

First of all, trying her recipe motivated me to find my biscuit cutters (which somehow had gotten stowed away all the way behind my baking supplies, how sad).  Having a perfectly round hole in the bread made a difference.

Second, I seasoned both sides of the egg.  Such an easy "d'oh!" but it's the kind of thing that isn't second nature to me yet (but I'm learning!).

Third, the recipe helped me time the cooking on each side correctly, including how long to let the bread cook before cracking the egg in.

It turned out SO good.  So good that I've made it again since then.  The last time I made it, I asked the hubby what he knew the dish as (I had heard of it as "toad in a hole" or "bird in a nest" - and I so don't get the toad one).  He actually hadn't heard of the dish as having a name but said he would just call it "Nom nom nom" so it is now "Nom-in-a-hole" in our house.

I was feeling ambitious that morning, though, and decided that I wanted to make something sweet, so I also made the French Breakfast Puffs.  Basically, these are cinnamon muffins, but they're not as heavy and dense as muffins - which is great because I hate muffins.  This is funny because "Muffin" happens to be the hubby's nickname for yours truly and so he jokes about how if I ate muffins, it'd be cannibalism.  (Ba dum dum, he'll be here all week.)  But these were good - there were actually air gaps inside them, that's how light they are.

That said, I made my usual mistake and overmixed them.  I do this with batters all the time because I turn on the stand mixer and walk away to do something.  But I recognize the problem, see?  And that's the first step, right?  And I know what the result is when I do this (baked goods get too heavy and dense, just a tiny bit in this case).  But I am working on it.  Next time I make these, I won't beat them as much.

I also swapped out the cinnamon for nutmeg because the hubby hates fake cinnamon and that's all I had.  (Did you know that what you buy labeled "cinnamon" probably isn't?  Yeah, disappointing.)  I still loved them and, damn, did the batter smell amazing.  I wanted to bathe in it.  These would be fantastic for Christmas morning.  Open a gift, eat a puff.  Open a gift, eat a puff.  Mmm.

Speaking of gifts, there was no way we were going to eat all the puffs this recipe makes, so we each just ate one and I packed up the rest to take to the hubby's parents' house.  The problem with this?  The last time I brought them muffins, they were mini-muffins and we used them as a clever way to announce I was pregnant.  So when I handed my mother-in-law the muffins, her eyes went wide and she said, "Wait, are you trying to tell me something??"

No.  No, we're not.  Actually, yes I am.  I'm telling you I made more muffins than I can eat.  But that's it.