Torrijas Caramelizadas (Spanish-Style Caramelized French Toast)

I'm one of those people who doesn't think of themself as a sweets person, but still orders dessert most of the time when out for a meal, and is then haunted for years by the perfection of some of those dishes. Recently I've been pining for the perfect torrija, the Spanish cousin to French pain perdu (what we call French toast), that I had nearly two years ago at Elkano, a restaurant in Basque country. It was a small block of brioche-like bread, saturated in a sweet custard, with a crunchy brûléed sugar top, served in a pool of the lightest crème anglaise I've ever tasted, with a spoonful of milk ice cream on the side and a slightly dated milk foam over top. Once you broke through the sugar shell, the bread was like pudding—it was perfect. Of course, there's no travel now, and I can't even start a quest to find the best torrijas in New York, so if I wanted torrijas, I was going to have to make them myself.