Peach Pecan Baked French Toast, etc.

A few weeks ago some friends and I went to Dream Dinners, one of those places that host frozen-dinner-frenzies.  If you've never done it, it's LOADS of fun!  We got a groupon and so it was much much cheaper than usual, which is why a bunch of graduate-school-fams were there.  No chopping, no dishwashing, no grocery-listing and shopping, no worrying about using up the other half of the bottle of whatsit before it goes bad...  Anyway, I came home with a dish that was fantastic, and today I replicated it.  It was purty good.  And everybody asked for the recipe.  Well, I'll do my best:  I am going to write it exactly how I did it and you will have to use your better judgment if it seems weird.   Some things were just because of what options I had at the grocery store.
And sorry, no cool pictures of the food on cool dishes with artistic napkins in the back or brightly colored garnishes.   The camera is in a coma.

Peach Pecan Baked French Toast
7 french bread rolls (they were about the size of hoagie buns)
Carmel dip for apples, thinned with heavy whipping cream until it pours a little more easily
1 package cream cheese, cut into "pats"
1 large (29 oz?) can of sliced peaches, reserving the syrup
handful of crushed pecans
1/4 cuppish of brown sugar
Heavy whipping cream (I used a pint and it was way more whipped cream than I could have ever used.)

for the egg mixture:

4 1/2 tbs cornstarch
6 tbs peach syrup
1 1/2 c sugar
5 eggs
1/2 c buttermilk (a little more, maybe)
3/4 c butter, melted (a little more?)
1 1/2 tsp vanilla (a little more)
a few dashes of cinnamon--maybe about a 1/4 tsp
an even fewer dashes of nutmeg and cloves (1/8 tsp?)

1.  Preheat oven to 425.  Spray a rectangular pyrex-typey thing with non-stick spray.  Cover the bottom of the dish with half of the carmel sauce (1 to 1.5 cups, I'd guess).  Cut the rolls hot-dog style (as in, not all the way through to the back side) and then into about six one inch segments, so that you have a bunch of pac-man-like pieces of bread.  place them in the carmel sauce with the slot side up--closed side in carmel.  You're going to need that slot.  Cut your cr. cheese into "pats" by cutting it in half lengthwise and then cutting about twice the thickness of a quarter for each pat.  Place a pat into each slot, putting extra pats wherever the heck you want them.

2.  Drizzle the rest of the carmel sauce over the bread/crm cheese.  Get it real good.  Cover those puppies.  Then place peach slices on top of each piece of bread and put any extras wherever you want--into the crevices and empty spaces... 

3.  Combine cornstarch with sugar well.  Then stir in peach syrup.  Next come the eggs and buttermilk.  Mix it all up.  Then add the butter, vanilla, and spices.  Pour over the bread.  top with brown sugar and pecans.  Bake for 10 or 20 minutes and then cover with foil once the top starts to look a little browned.  Continue baking for another 40 minutes or so.  It won't look completely set up because of the carmel sauce, so just take it out when you think it's had enough.  Let cool for at least 20 minutes, maybe more.  Whip the whipping cream and top.

I served this at a brunch at my house today and it was pretty well received, which is why the recipe actually came to be written and blogged.  I also served Baked Breadfast Taquitos with Lime Chipotle Dipping Sauce (As delicious as they sound but way simpler to make than they sound) and Coconut Banana Bread with Lime Glaze (an improvement over even the best regular old banana bread recipes, to be sure)--both recipes found on the blog Our Best Bites, which is an amazing recipe blog (thanks Matt and Mimi for sharing your love for this blog), and both raved about at the brunch.  Happy Fooding!