Sunday, September 19, 2010

Food adventures: Bacon chocolate chip cookies




Ah, these have been my favorite cooking adventure of the past few months. I did not come up with this recipe, sadly, but over the past year or two my love and obsession for bacon has grown pretty out of proportion, so why not make cookies? I got the original recipe idea from my friend Michael's sister, Laurain (check out her food blog here). Since the summer, I've made three batches. The first batch included candied bacon, shown here:

Candied bacon isn't actually too hard to make, just baking bacon with a lot of brown sugar, and baking it. The result is delicious, crispy, and sweet bacon. This I chopped into pieces and rolled into the cookies.

The first batch also included rendered bacon fat. I slow cooked chopped up pieces of bacon, then removed the bacon bits (to be put in the cookies, of course) and put the bacon fat in the freezer. It turned out like this:



It pretty much has the consistency of butter and it substituted about half of the butter that the recipe originally called for.

The pictures of the cookies below are the third batch, where I actually cheated a little bit. I took a package of frozen cookie dough, added bacon, and rolled out cookies from there. I'm a big of "semi-homemade" things, and since I have limited time to cook, I figure any shortcuts I can take for now are okay. When I made this batch, I picked 4-5 bacon bits to roll into each cookie, and then one big one on the top of each cookie so you could tell it was bacon. My two other batches had uneven amounts of bacon - some people complained they had too much bacon, and some not enough. Doing it this way proved useful since everyone had just the right amount of bacon to chocolate chips.

Here's cookies before they baked:



And here they are after!



From the three batches (more than 30 cookies each batch) I think I only had one or two of these cookies. They're too good not to share! I brought them to Johnson & Johnson to share with co-workers, my friend's graduation party, my parents, friends at the rock gym, ResLife training, made a whole batch just for the Philly dance community, and even sent them to Washington D.C., Boston, Nashville and Astoria, NY. They're simple, delicious, and satisfies my love for bacon and chocolate.

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