Monday, April 28, 2008
Another Productive Sunday
I haven't had (or really needed) a full-on Life Improvement Sunday Workshop lately, but my recent barrel o' Sundays have been quite productive and enjoyable nonetheless. Most of them involve cooking, tex-pats, music, and trippy screenings of films from yesteryear. This Sunday was a little different, in that I had a wild hair up my butt to bake something, which happens once every year-and-a-half or so.
The recipe: Bacon and Chocolate Chip Cookies With Maple Cinnamon Glaze
Everyone knows my favorite food is bacon, but another fun Kat-factoid is that I love chocolate chip cookies. Real original, huh? I am pleased that other people share my love for these two foods and see the potential in mixing them together. With my knowledge of baking being zero, I've been patiently waiting for someone to invent a method for doing such a thing.
The results weren't what I expected, but the cookies still taste pretty good. They're better than they look anyway, especially considering this is a camera phone pic:
I started with three pounds of bacon, and kind of burned the first batch on the stove since I wasn't familiar with Joe's kitchen and equipment. Since wasting edible bacon is a crime, I gave it a good home in my belly while I put the next load in the oven.
I used dark chocolate chips only (no white), and I think I may have used a few too many, which made the cookies more chocolatey than baconey. I also may have eaten some bacon from the oven too. My memory is a little hazy from all the smoke. The recipe calls for crispy bacon to mix into the cookies, and not all of it came out that way. The consistency of the bacon inside the cookies tasted fine once baked, I just wish there had been more of it. I think using larger pieces (Junior Mint-size instead of M&M-size) would have helped too.
The glaze wasn't that important to me, so we just threw together some stuff that Joe had in his kitchen. We only had a little over a cup of powdered sugar, so we used corn syrup for the remaining cup. We didn't have maple extract (who keeps that shit around?), so I made a similar (?) concoction with some remaining almond extract and pure maple syrup. I also mixed in a few stray bacon pieces, hoping the salty juices would add a little flavor. The jury's out on that one, but the glaze was still a lot better than I thought it would be. If you just dump it on the cookies, you'll make a royal mess, so I recommend using the glaze as dippin' sauce. And instead of crumbling more bacon on top, just wrap the cookie in a strip of bacon. Like all things, it will taste better when wrapped in bacon.
Thus concludes my yearly attempt to mix more than three ingredients together and heat them. Joe's kitchen is still intact and no one died. People even ate these things and liked them. Like Thanksgiving in September, I made cooking history in my own little world and got to eat afterward.
Just in case this quasi-annual baking jaunt ever takes off, we've already formed a marketing campaign. "Kat's Cookies: They taste better than cigarettes."
