Easy Overnight French Toast Casserole - Yellow Bliss Road (2024)

What you need

Ingredients

You’ll need to gather a few basic ingredients to start this baked French toast recipe.

• French Bread or Baguette – You can slice and layer like I did, or you can cut the bread into cubes. Either way works with this recipe.
• Custard Base – Eggs, milk, cinnamon, sugar, and vanilla extract are whisked together. The bread is soaked in the mixture to keep it moist and form a crust.
• Optional Additions – Maple syrup, sliced fresh fruit, dollops of sweetened cream cheese, butter or even crumbled bacon make delicious toppings or garnishes.

Variations

• Try using cubed bread instead of slices. Cut into 1-inch chunks like my Cinnamon French Toast Casserole recipe.
• Try different types of bread, like challah bread, brioche bread, sourdough bread or even wheat bread for different flavors and textures. Just make sure your slices are nice and thick, or the bread may end up getting soggy.

Serving Suggestions

You can serve this casserole with a variety of toppings. Here are some of our favorites:

• Sweet cream cheese (softened and stir in powdered sugar).
• Homemade whipped Cream.
• Fresh berries (strawberries, raspberries or blackberries) – try macerating the berries (sprinkle with sugar and let them sit in a covered bowl in the fridge overnight). They’ll be more like a chunky, fruity syrup.
• Crumbled bacon.
• Butter and warm maple syrup.

Recipe Tips

• Uniform slices – The main component of this recipe is the bread. You’ll want to keep the slices thick and as uniform as possible, and be sure to give them a few seconds to soak in the liquid. Press together with your hands if you have to. Any bread that isn’t soaked in custard will dry out.
• You don’t need day old bread – While day old bread will already be slightly stale, you can get around this by using a fresh loaf and drying it out on your kitchen counter. Slice it and let the pieces sit out on a baking sheet for a few hours to dry out a little.
• Use any bread you like. I used a baguette for mini slices, and it also tends to be a little more dense, and doesn’t need to be as stale. A larger loaf of french bread is good if you want to cut it into cubes instead of slices. But it is softer and will need to either already be stale or sit out to dry out.
• Prevent soggy french toast by using the right kind of bread – If your french toast casserole is soggy, it’s likely because of the bread you used. If the bread is too soft or too thin (think sandwich breads, like white or wheat) they may soak up too much liquid making the bread soggy or mushy. If this happens to you, try baking it for a bit longer so the egg can firm up a bit.

Recipe