Bacon Day: The Recipes

Bacon Day gave us a great excuse to try and share some of the recipes we’ve talked about on this site. The first, which I believe may be entirely original to Royal Bacon Society, was the Bacondoodle. It began with this basic Snickerdoodle recipe, but in place of the butter I used bacon grease. I also took about 5 slices of cooked bacon and ground them up in my mini-processor and added that to the batter. I also cooked a batch of regular Snickerdoodles for comparison.

I was really excited about this new recipe, and was a little let down by the results. First of all, the Bacondoodle took a little longer to cook than the Snickerdoodles and didn’t flatten out as much. That was no big deal, but then I tasted one while it was still warm and was disappointed by the lack of bacon flavor. I mean, it was there, but very subtle. If you didn’t know you were eating a Bacondoodle, you wouldn’t notice it. On the bright side, our friends said it was more moist than the Snickerdoodle, and a couple people thought it perfectly complemented the Bacon Bourbon. So all in all, a success.

My favorite recipe of the day was the Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeno Popper. So delicious and relatively easy to make, despite the hours of burning under my fingernails. (I recommend gloves when seeding the jalapenos.) I loved these babies so much that after several glasses of wine I promised to make them every single time any of the guests came to my house for dinner for the rest of their lives. I’m sure that won’t come back to bite me in the butt.

Finally, we had some simple bacon-wrapped asparagus. I blanched the asparagus for one-minute in boiling water, then wrapped each 5 spears in a half slice of bacon and baked at 350 for about 30 minutes. I really should have pre-cooked the bacon about half way so that the asparagus could have spent less time in the oven. Their little heads got a bit over-cooked, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Even Kindergartners agree: Bacon is worth celebrating!