The Post Wherein I Go Mainstream

Despite how terribly trendy bacon has become, especially bacon in sweets, I still love it. Bacon and I have a special bond. I'm sure you think you and bacon have a special bond, maybe you even have signs about and pictures of and novelty items depicting bacon around your home, but you don't know bacon like I know bacon. One day, in a more bacon-centric post, I'll explain how I'm so sure of this and perhaps even let you in on the origins of Honest Like Bacon. For now, this treat will have to suffice.

Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from Beth Michelle.

10 strips of bacon
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
10 tbsp butter
1 1/8 cup flour*
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 cup chocolate chips

1. Carmelize bacon thusly: place the strips in a single layer on a foil-lined baking sheet (again, preferably one with a lip). Spread 1/4 cup brown sugar over the strips and place into a 375 F oven. Allow strips to bake for about 6-7 minutes before removing them, flipping them over, and sprinkling the new side with another 1/4 cup brown sugar. Repeat baking process. When done (but not burnt!) remove from oven and place on paper towels to drain and cool. Lower oven temp to 350 F.

2. While bacon is cooling, cream together butter, white sugar, and remaining brown sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour and baking soda.

3. Add egg and vanilla to butter-sugar mixture. Once well combined, add dry ingredients* (I found this dough to be rather liquidy for cookie dough so if you decide you need to add more flour, you should. I know I should have).

4. Now that the bacon is sufficiently cool to handle and drained, chop it up into chocolate-chip sized pieces. Add it, and the chocolate chips, to the cookie dough.

5. Place tablespoon-sized balls of dough on a greased baking sheet. Cook for 15-17 minutes, or until preferred doneness.

Active Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour


Tips and Tricks
- If you have a chocolate chip cookie recipe you love already, simply candy the bacon as directed above and add it to your recipe (though potentially cut the amount of salt in it in half); there's nothing in particular about this recipe that's suited to carry bacon, nor is it necessarily one of my favorite cookie recipes overall.
- Drain the damn bacon. I am super impatient and didn't do this, which was probably part of my liquidy dough problem.
- Grease the cookie sheets with the left over bacon grease. You'll be glad you did.

Serving and Pricing info: This yielded 20 cookies for me, so you'll probably get between 1.5-2 dozen. All I had to buy for this was bacon so it ended up costing $0.20/cookie. Not bad.

How was it? The smoky bacon flavor was definitely a great compliment to the chocolate, although as I mentioned before, the cookies themselves weren't fabulous. Next time I'll use my own recipe.