Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Bacon Cake is a Lie



I don't know what possessed me to do this. It just came to me and I had to try. I had to make a bacon cake. Just to see what it could look like.

So I plotted my cake. I knew I had a big chunk of fondant waiting to be played with, so I figured I'd make a bacon-esque shell out of that. But, what would I fill it with? Maple seemed like the obvious choice to flavor my cake batter. Though, it seemed wrong to make a bacon cake and not actually include bacon IN the cake. To do so would make the cake a total lie. So I decided to whip up a batch of candied bacon and crumble that into some maple butter cream frosting.

Everything tastes better with bacon, so why not cake? ...Right?

So I made up some candied bacon, starting by par-cooking a half dozen slices of bacon in my skillet for a few minutes to remove most of the fat. This keeps it from sweating off all the sugars in the oven later. I then collected my bacon and massaged it with a mixture of one teaspoon pure maple syrup and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Once each piece got a thorough rub down, I set them into a roasting pan lined with parchment. I sprinkled the remaining sugar on top of each slice and placed them onto the top rack of a 350 degree oven.

I baked them for about 14 minutes, turning once. I pulled them out and let them cool on a wire rack. The result was sweet, crisp, candy coated bacon.

I then mixed three cups powdered sugar with 1/2 cup unsalted butter and 2 teaspoons of pure maple syrup. Adding a little milk to whip the mixture into a frosting. I then took 2 pieces of my cooled bacon and crumbled them into my food processor and pulsed a few times to make candied bacon bits. I mixed these into my frosting and tasted... pretty good! Pancakes with a side of bacon good. I figured that maybe there was some hope, maybe this cake wouldn't be some hopelessly gross hipster experiment.

Not wanting to bother with baking a cake from scratch today, I just grabbed a box of mix and flavored it with one teaspoon maple extract. Once my cake was baked and cooled, I cut out a wavy bacon shaped chunk, trimmed the edges and divided it.

I sandwiched a layer of the bacon butter cream in between my layers of cake and then crumb coated it with a little more butter cream. I set this into the freezer to quickly chill while I got working on tinting the fondant. Once the crumb coat had chilled I pulled it out and applied a thicker coat of frosting to the outside of the cake, then put it into the refrigerator to chill.

I took roughly 12oz of fondant and divided into three portions. I tinted each either brownish red, pink or ivory using red, soft brown and yellow food coloring gels. I played with the fondant a lot trying to get it to look something like bacon. I found that the best method of getting semi realistic bacon is to tear sheets of the fondant and arrange the torn bits back into one collective sheet.

I took my fondant bacon sheet and draped it over my cake, then smoothed and trimmed it. It looked like a giant slab of uncut bacon. Sweet.

I snapped a few photos and then cut a slice.



It tasted pretty good! Sweet like a maple bar with little crisp bits of bacon and probably just as deadly. This thing is a heart attack served by the slice.

All in all, it wasn't half bad, very sweet and the salty bacon was a nice contrast. I don't know if I would actually serve this cake at a party (it is just too strange), but as a little experiment, it was lots of fun.

14 comments:

  1. Candied bacon?! You're insane. Absolutely insane.

    But my goodness. If heart attacks ever looked good edible, this is the time.

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  2. That cake is AMAZING. I didn't think it would actually have bacon in it but you proved me wrong!

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  3. Don't underestimate the mass appeal of maple syrup and bacon together - that's the winning combo I ate in a McGriddle on my way to work today.

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  4. Ok, this is one of the greatest things ever. Seriously. I would totally serve that at a party. Course if I had made it it wouldn't look anything like bacon, but my fondant skills are nonexistant. Heh.

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  5. Oh, this is funny. Good job with the fondant - it does look like a big slab of bacon.

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  6. I really want to try this now. Sort of. I think?

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  7. This was seriously brilliant. I wouldn't even know where to begin to make something so deliciously crazy!

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  8. A doughnut shop near my house makes "Smoky Bacon Maple Bars."

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  9. Ah, hah I love the rise of bacon desserts going on lately, and the shock of people just discovering them.

    Near the end of summer I had made a batch of dark chocolate bacon cupcakes, which had great flavor depth besides just being absurd novelties =D

    The recipe I followed called for a dark cocoa in the batter and frosting, resulting in near black cupcakes adorned with crumbled bacon and salt (there was of course, a good bit of bacon within as well)

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  10. I really like bacon specially for breakfast is absolutely delicous and when i p prepare the breakfast my family is really happy. There are people who never take breakfast and this is very harmful for the health, even there are several men who are presenting sexual problems because of that, maybe because they are so weak, but buy viagra can be timely resolution but you never can´t avoid the breakfast.

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  11. i think a great variation to this would be using the same frosting but making a chocoalte cake using vosges mo's bacon chocoalate :) yumm...truely turely a delight

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