What's the best thing you can do with bacon?

Add maple.  Obviously.  Or in this case add maple, pecan and bourbon and make Maple, bacon, bourbon and pecan cookies.

They sound weird, they sound like they shouldn't work, but strangely enough they do.  And they are really, really good.  So good in fact that I got my proper camera out to take picture of them, rather than using whatever phone was lying to hand as usual.

Look, I properly staged the picture and everything. The people of pinterest would be almost proud of me. 

Anyway, when you've all finished laughing at marveling over my photographic skills, I suggest you have a go at making these.

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter, softened (225g to you and me.  I have NO idea how you are meant to get a cup of butter.   Do you melt it?)
• 1 ½ cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon maple extract - I couldn't find any so substituted for a tablespoon of maple syrup
• 2 tablespoons bourbon
• 2 ¼ cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 cups pecan pieces
• ½ cup crispy bacon pieces (about 8 ounces of bacon cooked to crispy)

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Line trays with baking paper.  I needed four.
2. Cream together the butter and the sugar until fluffy.
3. Add the eggs and combine well, and then add the maple extract  syrup and the bourbon and combine really well.
4. Add the dry ingredients to the batter and mix until you have a sticky dough.
5. Add the pecan pieces and bacon to the batter and mix well.
6. Scoop the cookie dough by the spoonful onto the prepared sheet pans and bake for 14 minutes at 180 degrees.

Remember to let them cool properly.  I think mine could have handled an extra two or three minutes in the oven as they're quite soft and crumbly.  But they're delicious and bacon filled so I will forgive them for this.

Big birthdays, bigger cakes

My little sister, one of my very favourite people in the whole world, recently turned 30.  I’m not really sure how that happened, because the last time I checked she was very definitely 16.

She asked me to make her a birthday cake, then she asked me to write about it on this blog.  Fortunately I made the cake more promptly than I wrote this post (her birthday was over a month ago –I’m ashamed of myself). I’ve been trying to get her to write a guest post for me for a while.  Hopefully showing you all her birthday cake will push her to get her guest blogging skills into action.

Anyway – it was her birthday, she was 30, she likes shiny things; so I combined a little of Cake A with a little of Cake B and made her a Surprise Rainbow Cake.

Basically this was the top tier of Charlie and Simon’s wedding cake, with the inside hollowed out and filled with smarties.  I bought 3kg of smarties on ebay for this enterprise.  There were quite a lot left over.

I found someone on the internet to make the sparkly cake topper for her.  Normally I would link to the website I used, but to be honest the customer service wasn’t great, so I’m not going to.  If you want your own sparkly cake topper you’ll need to search google yourself.