On July 7th Eric emailed me this blog post detailing an experiment in mixing two delicious things: bacon and chocolate chip cookies. In the subject line he asked, “wanna bake some cookies?”. Yes, of course I did. Various summer going-ons delayed our cookie date but yesterday we finally got the chance to try this experiment ourselves.

Muffin was so great at documenting her experience so I’ll try to give the recipe without too many embellishments. We started with your standard chocolate chip cookie dough recipe:

3/4 cup butter (She suggests trying 1 cup because her cookies may have been a bit dry. I only had 3/4 of a cup in the fridge and did find the dough a bit too dry so added a smidgen of vegetable oil.)
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract (She uses 1/2 tsp as well as 1 tsp of hazelnut extract. I didn’t want to introduce other complicated flavours and only used vanilla.)
2 1/2 cups flour (If you are only using 3/4 cup of butter, I would reduce the flour to maybe 2 cups…?)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (She uses 1 cup of white chocolate and 1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate but Eric and I both agreed the white chocolate would be a bit too festive.)
2 cups of bacon bits – the real-deal bacon bits, not simulated

We bought two jars of these bacon bits at Stong’s, each having just under 1 cup of bits:

The cookie dough was assembled like any other cookie dough and the bacon bits were mixed in at the end (at the same time as the chocolate chips):

This is the finished dough:

Doesn’t it look wonderful? A taste test left me drunk with cookie anticipation while we rolled the dough into small balls:

Each pan went into the oven at 350 F for 10-11 minutes. In the meantime, we fried the topping bacon. We used a whole package, I don’t know how many pounds it was, but your standard package size of bacon:

Baking cookies in the oven and frying bacon on the stove might not be the most comfortable activity for a hot, humid day in August. Luckily the sun was going down and we were gifted with a beautiful, calm and cooling sunset sky:

While the cookies and bacon cooled a little, we prepared the maple glaze. Muffin was so smart to include the maple glaze. It acts as both a adhesive for the bacon topping and a bridge between salty savory bacon and the sweeter cookie. The glaze was made with:

2 cups icing sugar
1 1/2 tablespoon maple extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
some cinnamon
milk to make a thicker glaze (She uses water but I didn’t feel right about that.)

We spread the glaze on each cookie and topped with a piece (or a few) of the fried bacon. The results:

The conclusion: these are some of the most incredible cookies that I have ever eaten. The salty bacon compliments the cookie and chocolate so well. The layers of flavour leave you feeling like you have just eaten a delicious breakfast meal in cookie form. I have never had such satisfaction out of a cookie as I do with these. I can’t imagine anyone who is not a vegetarian not liking these cookies. Make them. Eat them.