A fun breakfast or snack!

When I was a kid one of my favorite treats was real cinnamon toast. Sure, I liked the cereal okay, but once I learned that you could just slap some butter on bread with sugar and cinnamon and toast it, I never really went back to the cereal.

Real cinnamon toast, if you’ve never had the good luck to have a slice, is buttery, a bit sweet, soft in parts and crunchy in parts. Basically, it’s heaven on bread.

I thought it be a fun snack to take this to the next level and really toast the bread so it’s nice and crunchy and then chop it into sticks that can be dunked in warm milk. It’s half cereal, half toast, but very tasty and perfect for kids. Not that I have kids, but I think I am one at heart, so I enjoyed this just fine.

Cinnamon Crunch Sticks

Yield: 2 pieces per person

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1/3 Cup sugar
1 1/2 Tablespoons cinnamon (up to 2 Tablespoons)
Pinch of salt
Bread
Butter
Milk

Directions:

1) Stir together sugar, cinnamon and salt.

2) Toast bread in a 400 degree oven for about 5 minutes.

3) Take bread out, turn it over, and lightly (or heavily) butter it. Then sprinkle liberally with cinnamon sugar.

4) Return toast to oven for another 5-7 minutes. Maybe longer depending on how much butter you used.

5) Remove toast and slice into thick sticks. Return sticks to oven to crisp up for another minute or two.

6) Serve with warmed milk sprinkled with cinnamon!

Making the sticks

I used a nice whole wheat bread for my sticks but you can obviously use any bread that you have available. Try to stay away from the super-flimsy white stuff though. It just doesn’t toast up as well in my opinion.

Basic stuff.

For the cinnamon sugar, I like to add a pinch of salt to the mix also which heightens the flavors a bit. Just a tiny pinch goes a long way. Roughly, I always do a 4-to-1 ratio of sugar to cinnamon, but feel free to up it if you want.

There's some salt in there too.

Stir it all together and you’re ready to go. Again, this is a really kid-friendly dish. They could help out with this part.

All mixed up!

To actually make the sticks, start by toasting your bread in a 400 degree oven for about 5 minutes.

Take it out and turn the pieces over. The bottoms of the pieces will be more toasted than the top. Lightly (or heavily) butter that side and then get ready to sprinkle.

Feel free to sprinkle liberally!

I sprinkle pretty liberally. I probably used about 2 Teaspoons per piece of bread. As you can see though, not all of my sugar makes it onto the bread.

Lookin' good.

Stick this back into the oven for another 5-7 minutes until the bread is start to get pretty crispy. Depending on how much butter you use, you might need to go as long as 10 minutes.

Once you take your pieces out, slice them up into nice thick slices. This was my version after about 8 minutes.

Nice and brown.

The key now is to add the sticks back into the oven so they crisp up around all the edges. Just another minute or two should do the trick.

The end result will be really crispy. Almost too crispy to eat on it’s own. But if you serve these with some warm milk (sprinkled with cinnamon for effect), then they are perfect for dunking.

Warm milk is awesome with this.

Dunking them softens them just a bit and the milk/butter/cinnamon is really awesome. I can see why someone decided to make a cereal out of those flavors!

If you have kids or if you happen to be an adult kid like me, then you’ll almost definitely love these crunchy sticks.

Turns out I was very wrong. The issue was that all of the recipes assumed that you were making enough for, say, a restaurant. When I decided to make grissini (thin bread sticks) using the recipe in this book, it turns out that it would have made something like 600 sticks. That’s a bit more than I needed by about a factor of 20. So I tried to do some dividing and come up with a workable recipe. Turns out that was easier said than done because I ended up with fractions of ingredients. It wasn’t pretty.

Ultimately though, I did find a recipe that worked and I ended up with these beauties.

So the photo above was from the successful batch, but before I get to that I want to go back to the failure.

I actually thought this was going to be an easy recipe and I think I got too cocky because of it. I mean how hard could it be to make bread sticks?! I did some crazy substitutions. I didn’t let the dough ferment long enough. I didn’t roll them correctly.

It was just a crazy mess of disasters that sometimes happens in baking and is always a humbling experience. I put a bunch of different spices on the failed version and they looked like this.

FAIL

Now. Let’s be clear. These guys were perfectly edible. And in fact someone who tried both versions said they preferred what I considered to be the failed version. I just wasn’t really happy with them because they weren’t what I was envisioning. I wanted the crispy browned sticks that were thin and salty and delicious. And you know, round.

These were square and more doughy which wasn’t what I wanted.

Too doughy.

Ok. So after that fail, I decided to try again a few days later and be diligent. In fact, I decided to try an entirely different recipe that would be a bit easier to scale down.

Grissini (adapted from Susan’s Recipe at Wild Yeast)
(Makes 32 bread sticks)

- 270 g (scant 2.5 Cups) all-purpose flour
- 42 g (1/4 Cup) whole wheat flour (Susan’s recipe uses only AP flour, but I figure I would add a bit of whole wheat flour for extra flavor)
- 1 Teaspoon instant yeast
- .75 Teaspoon salt
- 200 g water at room temp (if you don’t have a digital scale, 236g water = 1 cup so this would be a scant cup. If your dough is too sticky then add more flour a bit at a time.)
- 1 Tablespoon olive oil
- Whatever toppings you want (for this version I just used kosher salt and pepper)

If you are making this without a mixer, combine the flour(s), yeast, and salt in a bowl. Then mix the the olive oil and water in a cup. Add your wet ingredients to your dry ingredients and mix well until your dough forms a ball. On a lightly floured surface, knead the dough for 4-6 minutes until it soft and elastic.

Then let the dough ferment, loosely covered, for 2 hours at room temperature in a lightly oiled bowl.

Once the dough has at least doubled in size, cut it in half with a dough cutter or serrated knife and then roll it out into a rough rectangle and using a pizza cutter, slice it up! You can make the other half right away if you want for the full 32 bread sticks or you can freeze the dough for up to 3 months without a problem.

Cutting the stuff.

Next is a crucial part that I missed on my failed attempt. Take each of these strands and roll them a bit to form the bread stick. For some reason I thought that if I cooked them as is, they would puff up and form a stick. NOT TRUE. Just lightly roll them though until they form the desired shape.

Then lay them out on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and dust with whatever toppings you want.

Some of the salt will fall off.

Bake these bad boys at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes or until they are lightly browned and super crispy. My oven really sucks and loses heat like crazy so maybe check them at 20 minutes.

Once they are out of the oven, cool them on a rack for maximum crispiness. Then put them in some kind of artsy cup or bowl obviously.

Artsy!

Ok. So this recipe isn’t that hard actually. It is pretty similar to a pizza dough recipe, just slice it up before baking instead of making pizza.

What’s nice about these bread sticks is that they keep really well for days. I snacked on them for an entire week and they were just fine.