Vegan french toast

Saturday morning, I woke up a bit earlier for coffee and pedicures with my friend Lisa.  We opened the bag of Kona coffee that I brought home from Java Kai's Coffee Shop in Kauai.  It was the perfect thing to inspire juicy gossip and homemade breakfasts. 

Last week, I bought a multigrain baguette that I planned to eat with tomato soup mid week.  Well, that tomato soup didn't happen until Saturday afternoon.  I needed to get some use out of this baguette, so I made french toast.  Well, vegan french toast.

I used a recipe from The Idiot's Guide to Vegan cooking as a guide, but I never have all the ingredients, so it was somewhat amended.  I used regular flour and omitted the nutritional yeast flakes (which I've decided I don't like) and Preston's fake kind of syrup because I realized that my good real maple syrup was in the pantry for several days instead of refrigerated after opening like it should be.  I think the french toast turned out pretty good.

The big difference was that I ground some macadamia nuts in my food processor and tapped them on the outside of the bread after soaking it in the milk mixture, and that I only soaked the bread for a few seconds instead of two minutes.  This worked really well at first, when there was a lot of butter in the pan.  I made about 8 slices of toast, and cooked all but two at the same time.  When I put the last two in, the margarine in the pan was pretty much gone and the pan may have been too hot, so the nut crust burnt before the toast cooked through.

I want to add to the mac nut crust to make it more of a real crust.  I'm thinking maybe brown sugar.  This recipe comes with a "to be continued..."