A soft, buttery brioche bread filled with cinnamon sugar.

My mom makes great breakfast toasts. Growing up, I remember there being quite a variety of toast options in my house and there was just something about my mom’s toast that tasted better than all other toasts. Even today, just plain toast with butter tastes so much better when my mom makes it. I think that’s just a mom thing. But hands down, the top two toasts of my childhood were cheese toast and cinnamon toast. Cheese toast is fairly self explanatory- its toast that my mom would top with slices of cheese and slip under the broiler for a few minutes. The edges would crisp and then cheese would get all melty and delicious. For cinnamon toast, my mom would smear the toast with butter and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar before tucking it into the heat of the oven. There were the extra toasty bites where the sugar had begun to caramelize and the soft squishy bites where the butter completely soaked the toast. It was a work of toast art. 

This is a traditional brioche dough swirled with softened butter and cinnamon sugar, reminiscent of those cinnamon toast mornings of my school years. Brioche is an enriched dough, which means that has sugar, eggs, and butter, all of which add flavor and richness to the dough, but slow down gluten development and yeast production. This means that brioche dough needs a longer mixing time and a longer proofing time than other yeasted doughs. For this, we tuck our dough into the fridge to cold proof for 6-12 hours (or overnight). Cold proofing slows fermentation and gives the butter a chance to re-solidify before shaping so that it doesn’t melt out of the dough when you begin working with it. This also means that you can mix your dough the night before and have freshly baked cinnamon brioche in the morning, which is never a bad thing in my opinion. 

After the dough has been filled, we slice it and braid to, similarly to a babka, mostly because I think it looks pretty and the swirls make sure that there is cinnamon sugar in every bite. After it rises one last time, the dough is baked until golden brown and then brushed with butter. In the words of the great Ina Garten, “How easy is that?”