The Ice Cream Hack For Dessert-Worthy French Toast That's So Much Simpler Than The Real Thing

Sure, you can serve French toast with a scoop of ice cream, but you can also use ice cream to cook the toast to sweet, caramelized perfection. If you've tried milk bread French toast and our strawberries and cream French toast bake yet are still craving a sweet dish to dig into in the mornings, just wait until you dip bread into melted ice cream — no eggs required.

Instead of having to whip ingredients into a perfect custard for dipping, simply melt ice cream. Submerge sliced pieces of toast and cook the pieces in a pan as you would in a traditional recipe. This quick hack comes in handy when egg prices soar, and you can experiment by using different flavors of ice cream to drown each piece of bread. Like any kind of French toast recipe, cooked pieces can be dressed up with swirls of maple syrup, or you may want to borrow inspiration from your favorite ice cream recipes and add spoonfuls of chocolate or caramel sauce, whipped cream, sprinkles, and cherries for the sweetest start to the day. 

Depending on the ice cream flavors you have on hand, you can add extra spices and flavoring to the melted ice cream to turn up the flavor dial on your dish. Sprinkle pumpkin pie spice into a melted dish of vanilla ice cream for an added warming flavor, or dash a few drops of your favorite flavored extracts to boost the volume of almond, vanilla, or butterscotch notes in your recipe.

Set out shallow dishes of roasted nuts, fresh berries, and homemade honey whipped cream for breakfast eaters to gussy up their plates as they please. A recipe this good, however, only needs a generous pat of butter, a pinch of flaky sea salt, and a quick sprinkle of powdered sugar to knock the first bite out of the park. After all, if this ice-cream dipping hack worked for legendary chef Jacques Pépin, it is certainly one for our books.