le blog de tranny

This will be the first in a series of three different recipes, featuring three kinds of meat, from me to you. If you’re looking for an easy process with a big pay-off, look no further! I’m fat.

Rosemary & Candied Bacon Cookies
Last Friday we had our first house-to-house: 5 houses, one drink/optional snack each, all in the neighborhood. Caro and I decided we should make Papa Norm’s lemonade, which consists of homemade sweet & sour infused with rosemary, orange blossom water (which we left out), bourbon and Chambord. We’d been planning on serving an appetizer of goat cheese and Caro’s tomato jam spread on olive bread, but the other day over dinner Caro mentioned it might be a good idea for us to serve a dessert, such as cookies, as our house would be the last destination on the h2h itinerary. So we did both, Caro taking charge of the lemonade and toasts and I the cookies. I immediately thought of a post I’d seen by The Homesick Texan of a recipe for chocolate chip cookies with bacon grease, but ultimately decided that if I was to try and pull off a bacon dessert, the presence of bacon would have to be prominent. I’d have to take the candied bacon route. I saw a number of recipes on the web for chocolate chip and candied bacon cookies, but pairing the candied bacon with rosemary sounded better to me. Actually it sounded amazing — pork, brown sugar and rosemary go so well together on a plate — in cookie form the combination might be reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s chewing gum embodying an entire meal. I saw quite a few rosemary cookie recipes on the internetz but all of them took the shortbread/butter cookie route. I thought perhaps a darker maple-y cookie might work better, and I do not regret this last minute call.

Candying bacon is actually really easy. I followed David Lebowitz’s method of laying the bacon strips on a baking sheet covered with tin foil, shiny side down, spreading a few tsp of brown sugar evenly over each strip, and baking it at 400 degrees F for 20-35 minutes (fattier bacon takes longer), turning the strips over and sprinkling more brown sugar over them halfway through baking (and pouring off fat/replacing the tin foil if needed), removing the bacon once it had darkened a bit. You have to let it cool so the sugar can harden before you start working with it.

I kind of based my cookie recipe on this one for candied bacon & chocolate chip cookies, but it’s slightly different, so I’ll just re-write it here. You need:

- 6 to 8 strips of candied bacon, diced
- 3/4 cup white granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup brown sugar
- 2 egg yolks
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter
- 2 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- pinch of salt
- 2 tsp of maple syrup (or dark corn syrup)
- 1 1/2 to 2 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Cream together the butter and two types of sugar. Whisk in the egg yolks, vanilla extract, and maple syrup. (I’d originally been planning on squirting some maple syrup into the batter but all I had on hand was dark corn syrup. It was fiiiine.) Combine the flour, baking soda, salt and rosemary in a separate bowl. Add these dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir with a wooden spoon until just combined. Fold in the candied bacon (I used my hands). Arrange spoonfuls of the dough on a cookie sheet. Bake for about 15 minutes or until the edges of the cookies just start to brown. Serve with Papa Norm’s lemonade.

Here’s some of Caro’s photos from the h2h: