Never Bashful with Butter

*EDIT 1/18/07*
For those of you who are just now reading this post, here are a few things I’d like to note-

• Yes, there is bacon on the inside of the cookie as well as on the top as a garnish
• Yes, I used “Streaky” bacon, not “canadian” bacon.
• Maple syrup is not the same thing as maple extract. Maple extract is much stronger than even reduced maple syrup. You will not achieve the same effect as Maple extract with Maple syrup!
• The cinnamon maple glaze is there for a reason. Have you ever splashed a little maple syrup on your breakfast bacon? Its not half bad. It bridges the gap between pork and cookie.
• if you change the recipe or the ingredients and you’re not happy with the outcome, Sorry. Don’t blame me.
• If the idea of bacon cookies doesn’t sound good to you, pass on through. Complaining is optional and most likely to be ignored.

And lastly-

• PLEASE OH PLEASE remember to cook your bacon before using it to make the cookie. No one wants a bit of uncooked pork in their cookie. That would be the opposite of delicious.

——————————————–
This whole thing started the other night when my husband and I were having a conversation about what foods could and could not be made better with the addition of bacon.

Sure, that was a good salad, but it would have been so much better with bacon. That was a delicious baked potato.. I wish it had some bacon on it. You know what was missing from breakfast this morning?- bacon. I think we’ve come up with so many foods which bacon can enhance, that we really were wondering what foods it wouldn’t.

We came up with quite a few ideas… Lemon and bacon should stay far far away from each other, at least as far as a direct contact with the lemon juice goes (and this is just my personal opinion). The tartness of the citrus would render bacon’s smoky rich undertones utterly useless.

This would definately be bad for bacon. Also, bacon and peaches are a no go (at least for me, as I’m not a fan of peaches). This means no bacon peach cobbler, no peaches and cream with bacon. Actually, bacon and milk should probably stay far away from each other (again, as far as direct contact with the milk itself goes). Bacon panna cotta? no. Not good. Bacon Jello also wouldn’t work. I think the bacon might actually interfere with gelatin’s jelling properties, but I don’t know for sure, because I haven’t yet tried it. And there will definitely be no boiling of the bacon. Have you seen ‘Better off dead’? Ew.

Then we started talking about what bacon has successfully been added to, and the thought of the maple bacon bar donut at Voodoo donut back home, and Vosages bacon chocolate bar made me wonder..

Could I make a cookie with bacon? How about a chocolate chip cookie?

My husband cringed. He asked me to make a small batch, just in case. He’s a big fan of standard chocolate chip cookies, so to see a whole batch go to waste if the bacon addition didn’t work, I think it might have made him cry.

But I had to do it. The bacon and chocolate chip cookie had to be made.

So I did it. I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies, split the dough in half and added a whole mess of bacon to it. I probably would have called it quits at half a cup of bacon bits, but I couldn’t see the bacon in the dough, so I added another half cup. That’s a whole cup of bacon bits in half a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

(this photo is iso you can see the bacon bits in the cookie itself)

Typically, I would never advocate the addition of meat to a sweet cookie, but I’ve always viewed bacon as “the candybar of meats” so I only felt slightly weird about it.

Amazingly enough, these cookies are DELICIOUS.

I topped them with a small amount of cinnamon maple glaze and a little piece of bacon, just so people know, YES! There is bacon in here.

So if you’re feeling adventurous, or if you know of a bacon obsessed nerd who might appreciate these cookies, you should definitely make them. Here is my recipe-

Bacon chocolate chip cookies-
(this is for a FULL batch)

3/4 cup butter(It has been suggested that using 1 full cup of butter works best due to cookie dough dryness)
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon hazelnut (or almond) extract

*Edit- It has been suggested that the almond flavouring may be overpowering to the flavour of the cookie, feel free to add this ingredient to taste*
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg (It has been suggested that using 2 eggs works best due to cookie dough dryness)
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup white chocolate chips
1 cup dark or semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 cups bacon bits (if preferred, you can separate the dough into two parts and only make half of the dough into bacon cookies, in which case you’ll only want to use 1 cup bacon bits)

*An important note- Be sure to use real bacon bits, not Bacos *See large print at the bottom of this post*

Also, you can make your own bacon bits, just make sure you pat down the bacon chunks with paper towels to remove as much extra bacon grease as possible. *Edit* one of my readers made their own bacon bits and found out that apparently it takes about 2lbs of bacon to make 2 cups of bacon bits, just for future reference.

Directions-

preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit.

Beat together the butter, sugars, flavouring and eggs until creamy. In another bowl, sift together the dry ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and stir together. Dough will be slightly soft. If you want a cakier cookie, add another half cup of flour. Add in chocolate chips and bacon bits. Stir until well integrated. Place dough on a sheet of waxed paper and refrigerate at least an hour. Remove dough from fridge, pinch off 1 1/2 inch pieces of dough and roll into balls. Set dough balls about 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Flatten dough balls slightly with your fingers in the center.

Bake cookies for about 10 minutes, or until the dough starts to turn golden brown. Allow cookies to cool on a cooling rack while you ready the glaze.

Maple cinnamon glaze-

2 cups powdered sugar
1 tablespoon maple extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon *edit- it has been suggested that 1 teaspoon may be a bit much, so go ahead and add to taste*
enough water to make a thick glaze (I used about 3 tablespoons)

Mix all ingredients together until smooth and creamy. If lumpy, use a whisk.

Spread a small amount of the glaze on the top of each cookie and top with a small piece of crisp cooked bacon.

Voila! Delicious!

-A.

Just a little note-
I am in no way saying that I am the first person to create “bacon cookies”, I’m just sharing with you how I came about making a batch of them myself (although I did do a web search and wasn’t really able to find much on cookies with bacon in them, not everyone posts stuff on the internet.) And the recipe that I came up with.

If you’re upset because they’re made with meat, you can just as easily make them with egg substitute, earth balance instead of butter and fake bacon.

Also, if you do not like the bacon cookies, don’t make them. Insulting me because you can’t handle the bacon/cookie combo is completely unnecessary. You’re more than welcome to keep your opinion to yourself. These are purely a novelty/experimental cookie.

I am not planning on making meat cookies a regular part of my baking profile, so don’t worry. There will be no sausage patty cupcakes or beef candy… Although I did make meat cupcakes for April fools day…

I just needed to try something fun. Bacon cookies ARE fun. Bacon is funny.
It just so happened to taste pretty good.

So it snowed here in Seattle on Saturday.
To celebrate, I made a batch of iced sugar cookies with snowflakes on them.

The first cookies of the Christmas season!

I have always been a big fan of snow.
Snow days and snowflakes and snowmen are some of my favourite things.

Something about a cotton filled sky and a landscape of white just makes everything look happy and festive. It makes me want to turn off the TV and curl up infront of the window and watch the fluffy stuff accumulate on the green grass below, with a mug of hot cocoa at my side. Part of my inner child craves snow. I was always the kid who would run out into the snow in the middle of the night if I saw that it was snowing. I would spend my days making snowpeople and snow angels and catching snowflakes on my tongue while praying that the snow would keep going just one more day.

…And just one more day after that.

Snowdays were a hot commodity for school children.

I was lucky as a kid. I had my best friend living just down the road from me. Even though we lived in the middle of nowhere, we could manage walking to each other’s houses, so long as the snow wasn’t too packed, slick, or ice covered. I can remember many instances where my face, elbows and butt made quick contact with the ice covered snow when I wasn’t being very careful.

The long winter season in the northwest provided us much time to cultivate a system for lowering ice caused accidents while walking from place to place. Within this system, there were three guidelines-

Walk hard. Step down heel first.
Walk slow. Keep your feet shoulders width apart and brace yourself between steps for the possibility of slippage.
Carry a big stick. Roosevelt had this part right, as a big stick makes you into an instant walking tripod, and with a steady base, its nearly impossible to fall.

There were still accidents though. Like the time I didn’t realize that our porch steps were shiny because the snow on them had melted and then frozen again. Yeah, I was really glad that we only had 5 steps, but I was even more grateful that I only made contact with two of them as I fell to the fluffy snow below. Ouch.

My best friend was a little more prepared, it seemed. Her parents had moved to our neighbourhood from Minnesota a few years before she was born, and since the winters were much more harsh where they were from, they came with full winter battle regalia, a regular snow-pocalypse preparation kit. The day she made her way to my house in snowshoes, I seriously wondered why she had strapped tennis racquets to her shoes. The fact that she was wearing some strange polar ice cap rated snow suit was beside the point.

I was fairly comfortable in my jeans over sweatpants over leggings over bike shorts- situation, with my winter coat, which was sort of like a fleece lined windbreaker. I had a pair of gloves, but they were useless to me as they became waterlogged after one snowball had been formed, so they went on the ground, where I’d plan on picking them up later, but forget about on my way back into the house, so they’d stay there until the snow melted.

My mom was prepared for my daily snow outings. She set up a ‘decontamination’ station in the entryway of the house, laying out a layer of black plastic sheeting from the doorway to the heater, about 10 ft away, and setting up a quilt drying rack for me to lay my clothes on as I shed my layers of snow drenched clothing. I wasn’t allowed to set foot in the house until she set up this area, and I had to shake as much of the loose snow off of myself before even entering the prepared area. Anything to keep from dampening the carpets I guess.

For me, snow days were all about fun, freedom and friends, so when I see snowflakes, I’m reminded of those three things.

My snowflake adorned sugar cookies were simple to make, and could easily be decorated in a multitude of different ways.

So here is the recipe-

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup powdered sugar
2 teaspoons almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

In a medium sized bowl, whisk the butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add the sugars, flavouring, and eggs, and whisk thoroughly. Add the flour, baking soda and salt (I put the baking soda and salt on top of the flour and sort of stir it around before mixing all of the dry ingredients with the soft ingredients) and mix together using a spoon (wooden or plastic, just not a whisk). Dough will be soft and slightly sticky. Scrape all of dough onto a sheet of waxed paper and fold waxed paper over the dough. Refrigerate for about an hour.

Preheat oven to 350. With clean hands, roll a heaping teaspoon full of dough into a ball and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Make sure each dough ball is about an inch and a half away from the dough ball next to it. With cleaned and dried hands, press down on the top of each dough ball to flatten it slightly before baking. It will take anywhere from 6-10 minutes for the cookies to bake through. When the edges of the bottom of the cookie start to turn golden brown, pull the cookies from the oven. Either use multiple cookie sheets or allow the cookie sheet to cool between batches (otherwise the bottoms of the cookies will burn).

For icing, you have a few options.

If you are planning to give these cookies as packaged gifts, you might want to decorate them with royal icing, which is a thin icing that hardens as it dries so that when packaged, the icing is more sturdy and difficult to break. Recipes are available *HERE* .

If you’re planning on just eating them yourself or perhaps bringing them to a party, or some other use where they’re not really going to spend much time being looked at before being snarfed down, I’d suggest either using regular buttercream, cream cheese or boiled frosting.

If you’re looking for a thin icing that tastes better than royal icing (and isn’t made with egg whites or meringue powder) You can use this recipe from my archives that I’ve used on many occasions to decorate sugar cookies with very good results (there is also another recipe for sugar cookies on there, if you’re looking to make rolled sugar cookies).

Although the snow melted away nearly as fast as it came, for a few brief moments I found myself gazing out the window with the same seasonal excitement that I felt as a child on a snow day. I hope it snows again, it would be a wonderful year for a white Christmas!

-A

P.S. If you’re looking for ideas for packaging cookies for shipping, here is a link to some helpful tips and tricks!