The pictures of this on the Toast the Host blog made it clear that this would be a perfect hangover breakfast, which is exactly what I’m using it for!

The bread is made from American biscuits, which are a bit like our English muffins. The recipe uses bought pre-made refrigerator biscuits, but we can’t get those over here so I’ll have to make them myself. As it’s a fritter bread I want flaky (as opposed to fluffy) biscuits, so I’m following this Cook’s Illustrated recipe (subscription required).

As I don’t want to be making things while hungover I’m making the biscuits and filling the day before and keeping in the fridge over night, so all I need to do on the day is assemble and bake. The bread recipe uses 8 biscuits, each halved and then flattened to the size of the tin, but it doesn’t look like the whole tin gets filled… So I’m going to make enough for 16 biscuits, but roll them thin and cut to the correct size to begin with.

• 2 cups of bread flour (cheap bread flour around 12% protein)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 100g butter, cut into small cubes
• 45g vegetable shortening, in pieces
• 180ml cold milk

Using the food processor the fats are cut into the dry ingredients before the milk is added to bring together into a dough. This seemed very wet, more batter than dough, but once turned out onto a floured surface it did come together into a dough I could roll.

The dough is roll out, book folded, then rolled out again to about 7mm (normally biscuits would be 1.5cm thick) before a cookie cutter is used to make the individual biscuits. I ended up with 19 large thin biscuits, instead of the 16 thick ones the recipe expects. These then go in the fridge until the next day.

I’m upping the amount of filling too:

• 4 (small) granny smith apples, very finely diced
• Juice and zest of 1 lemon
• 30ml Calvados
• 150g dark brown sugar
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground allspice

Simply heat all that on the hob until the apples are nicely softened. In theory. Turns out I’d added to much liquid (extra lemon juice and Calvados) so we needed to remove the apples and reduce the liquid on its own. Then this goes in a sealed container in the fridge.

To assemble: stand the bread tin on end, and stack the biscuits with a layer of apple filling in between each. This sounds easy enough… but like most things it’s not when you’re hungover!

We ran out of apples after 15 biscuits. It could have done with a few more to fill the tin properly, but it does give us 4 biscuits left over to use for a cherry cobbler later. Despite running out of apples there was still sauce, so we just poured that over the top.

To bake: cover with foil and into a 160C fan oven for 30 minutes, then take the foil off and cook for another 15 minutes until golden brown on top. It probably could have done with some more browning, but when you’re hungover and hungry you don’t really care about that sort of thing…

Then you’re supposed to let it cool, then glaze. We can’t wait for that, so we just serve it up hot and add the glaze into the bowl, where it becomes more of a sauce…

• 200g icing sugar
• 60ml milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

It might not look pretty, but mmm… gooey carby goodness.  Perfect hangover food.

If I were to do this as a proper dish, rather than hangover goo, I’d use even bigger biscuits to fill the tin width properly, which would mean a bigger batch of biscuits. I’d also use all the biscuits to fill the length of the tin, which would require more apples. I’d also not put as much liquid in the apples while softening them, and not add any of that liquid while cooking. Then I’d cook longer to brown them up properly, and of course leave to cool properly before glazing.