Chocolate and Bacon Shortbread

26 December 2011

Thanks to the Christmas holidays I have finally had time to do a bit of BBP (Bacon Boundary Pushing) again this past week, which led to the creation of some rather delicious (I'm not one to be humble) bacon and chocolate chip cookies! The best thing about these wee beauties are that they take minutes to make and hardly any effort - the only difficult bit is caramelizing the bacon, and even that is pretty straight forward.

What with them consisting mainly of butter, bacon fat, sugar, and bacon, they are also a great way of inducing a heart attack - should you be in to that sort of thing. If you are, you may also want to check out my bacon cinnamon buns. If you're a bit more aesthetically gifted than myself, I reckon they could make a nice gift as well, as they are a bit different - which is always fun - but still not too crazy for most people to handle. Then again they don't need to be perfect, do they? I've always disliked cakes and cookies that look too neat and too perfect - like they were made by a robot designed for the specific purpose of producing a uniform and perfectly flawless cake. Boooring! Anyway, on to the recipe..

Ingredients

(Makes about 20)

125g of Butter
55g of Caster Sugar
180g of Flour
110g Moscovado Sugar
100g of Bacon
50g of Dark Chocolate

Method

1) Since you will need the bacon fat for the shortbread dough, the first think you'll need to do is fry your bacon up proper crispy style (I know, I know, I use crispy bacon for everything). You're going to caramelize it later on, and while I'd normally recommend doing that in the oven I decided to do things a bit differently this time around since I wanted to use the fat in the dough. Leave the bacon fat in the frying pan for now.

2) Next up, it's dough time. Measure your sugar and butter out into a mixing bowl and beat them together until smooth, then add in your bacon fat and the flour. Mix until you've got a nice smooth paste. You'd be absolutely fine doing this by hand if you don't have a mixer.

3) Time to caramlize the bacon. Get a 2nd frying pan out, place if over medium-high heat, and add your moscovado sugar to it. Stir occassionally so as to keep the sugar from burning, and when it's all melted quickly lower the heat before coating your bacon and placing it on some baking paper. Be careful not to touch the sugar is it will be ridiculously hot and sticks to your skin, which isn't a pleasant combination.

4) While your bacon cools, chop your chocolate up into wee chips. Alternatively you could buy chocolate chips, but that would leave you with nothing to do at this point but wait.

5) Once the bacon is nice and cool, chop it up into small pieces, then add your bacon and chocolate to the shortbread dough and mix it all up. Next, turn it onto a work surface and roll it out to about 1cm thickness - this can be a bit of a bain, and (very) lightly greasing your rolling pin makes life a lot easier for you. I didn't, because that's not how I roll (I'm sorry), but quickly came to regret it. Anyway, once you've rolled the dough out just cut it into the size and shape you want and place on a lined baking tray. Set aside somewhere cool for about 20 minutes, meanwhile preheat your oven to 190c.

6) Bake for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Leave to cool, eat, enjoy.

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