How to Make The Best Cinnamon Toast - My Kitchen Little (2024)

Cloaked in nostalgia and guarded by a sense of privileged timelessness, to me, cinnamon toast should be mostly left alone. It simply has nothing to prove. To make the very best version of it, one need not lean on any manner of trickery to transform it into something that it isn’t, and that it was never intended to be. No, my fellow home cook, I am happy to tell you none of that is necessary. Not even a little bit. To craft the best cinnamon toast of your life, the real trick is to simply make the most of what is already there.

Cinnamon Toast: Less is More

Perhaps I am simply behind the times when it comes to my attitude toward these new age toasts that have been gracing restaurant menus and social media platforms for the last half-decade. This is very likely the case. But in my own experience, I’ve come to find that it is wholly unnecessary to reinvent the wheel when something so pure and simple and gorgeously plain as toast is involved. Isn’t simplicity kind of the point?

How to Make the Best Cinnamon Toast. Ever.

As a home cook, I constantly seek out tricks and techniques that can help to elevate my cooking – tools to aid me in my pursuit of making the best versions of things, despite my kitchen little. The answers are almost never about spending more money on trendy, show-stealing ingredients, or burying the soul of a classic dish beneath layers of gaudy, trying-too-hard extras. The notion that “more is more” rarely, if ever, holds any ground.

Its opposite, however, is a decidedly more interesting mantra to explore.

There may be no better food to underscore this point than the humble-yet-great cinnamon toast, one of my most beloved foods and something I’ve been known to crave on many an odd occasion. Today’s recipe was born from a dream-like middle-of-the-night craving, in fact.

Can You Use Brown Sugar for Cinnamon Toast?

YES! It’s the way – the very best way.

To accomplish this more modern take on a simple cinnamon toast, I swapped out the traditional white sugar, opting instead for brown. The deeper, more caramelized notes of brown sugar give this toast an extra layer of flavor that seems like it’s belonged there all along. It just makes sense. A bit of sparkly turbinado sugar gives this cinnamon toast an incredibly satisfying, almost shattering crunch with every bite. What’s more, we’re toasting today not in an actual toaster, but on the stovetop, as it helps preserve the soft interiors of the bread while enabling you to achieve the crust of your dreams

Lastly, and perhaps most notably, this recipe features a brown sugar and cinnamon simple syrup that we’ll drench each slice of toast with, just before coating in the cinnamon-sugar and then griddling up until caramelized and perfect. I made this for my kids as an after-school snack yesterday, in fact, tweaking and honing my recipe, making sure it was ready to hurl out into the world, and they grew immediately, beautifully, W O N D E R F U L L Y quiet. A good sign by all accounts.

What is the best bread for Cinnamon Toast?

The short answer? Whatever you’ve got on hand. Okay, maybe not rye – I dint think cinnamon + rye = delicious. Same goes for ultra savory breads and loaves … anything garlicky I’d pass on. But you get my point – just about any simple, unflavored bread will work.

I often make this toast with basic, mass-produced sandwich bread and it turns out SPECTACULARLY.

That said, the best situation would be to buy a loaf of unsliced bread – white or wheat – and cut thick, doughy slices yourself. This way, you get to decide just how fat your toast is. Which to me is a wonderful thing to get to control.

What ingredients do you need to make the best cinnamon toast?

It’s incredible to me how by simply rethinking the way in which we wield these basic building blocks, we can completely elevate a beloved classic like cinnamon toast. This recipe is proof positive of two major truths that go hand in hand: simplicity can be so utterly fruitful, and less is so often more.

This Best Ever Brown Sugar Cinnamon Toast is relatively humble, so far as its ingredient list goes (I did add a little vanilla).

• Bread
• Butter
• Cinnamon
• Sugar (in this case, brown)
• Maybe some salt

The final product is so wonderfully delicious that you may find yourself, if you’re anything like me, in awe over how a mere change of cooking method can transform a classic. It’s like performing a dance we all learned as kids, having memorized it at an early age, but changing up a couple of steps to give it a more mature, grown-up spin. This is our waltz, guys. This is our grown-up cinnamon toast.

And so. Bread. Butter. Cinnamon. Sugar. By simply wielding the classic ingredients of an unadorned cinnamon toast in different, more thoughtful ways, we are able to accomplish something exceptional, something remarkable in its deliciousness.

So here we are, extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary; a home cook’s triumph if there ever was one.

If you like the looks of this Best Cinnamon Toast, you might also want to try:

Healthy Homemade Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Easiest Cinnamon Sugar Popovers

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