One day, about week or so ago, when my hubby came home from work, he said, “Guess what I had at work today?”
Since his office tends to order food in for the employees quite often, it could have been pretty much anything, so of course, I didn’t know.
“Bacon chocolate chip cookies.”
As his words registered, I thought, “That’s genius.” And then and there I told him that I’d be making some…soon.
Because I was sure I could find a recipe for them on Pinterest.
I was right, and I had plenty of options to choose from.
When I realized we had company coming down for the weekend, I knew I had to make these cookies for us all to try out.
Now, I know some people think that bacon in everything is kind of cliché and so overdone, but you know what? There is a reason, people:
Bacon is GOOOOOD! 🙂
Therefore, I set out on Friday to make my first ever batch of bacon chocolate chip cookies. I have to admit that I was pretty excited.
The first step is to cook your bacon, obviously. And while you can do that in any way you like, I prefer to cook my bacon in the oven, per Alton Brown’s method:
“Place the strips of bacon onto a sheet pan fitted with a rack and place into a cold oven. Turn the oven to 400 degrees F and cook for about 12 to 15 minutes, depending on how crispy you like your bacon. Remove from rack and drain on paper towels.”
This is an easy way to get crispy bacon without much effort. 🙂
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- Bake bacon in the oven at 400 degrees
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- Cool bacon and crumble it
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- Crumbled bacon ready to be folded in to the cookie dough.
I let the bacon cool a little, then transferred it to some paper towels to drain. I also poured the bacon fat from the bottom of the baking sheet into a measuring cup. I used a 12-ounce pack of bacon and ended up with about ½ cup of fat. You need ¼ cup for this recipe.
To make the cookies, I adapted this recipe for bacon chocolate chip cookies. You are basically making a traditional chocolate chip cookie, but you substitute ¼ cup of the butter with the bacon fat and eliminate the usual teaspoon of salt. When you fold in the chocolate chips, you can add in bits of crumbled bacon, too. That’s pretty much it!
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- Cream butter, sugars, & bacon fat. Then add eggs & vanilla.
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- Mix in flour & baking soda.
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- Fold in bacon crumbles & chocolate chips.
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- Mix to combine.
Since this was my first time making them, I kind of underestimated how much the cookies would spread out on the baking sheet, so as they baked, the cookies spread into one big connected cookie, plus I think I made them too big. I also let them cook a bit too long so they were a little crunchier than I would have liked.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry too much about the presentation of the cookies since I was serving them to my family and very close friends. I did, however, whip out my biscuit cutter to cut out a few round cookies. I did a few with my star-shaped cookie cutter, too, just for the boys. The extra, odd-shaped edges were more like cookie sticks, which made them great for dunking in milk. 🙂
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- Drop by rounded tablespoons onto prepared baking sheet
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- Mine were too big and too close.
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- Cookie cutters saved the day.
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- Round and star-shaped cookies. 🙂
Oh, and despite not being the prettiest cookies I’ve ever made, they were still pretty tasty. Like, really, really yummy. While they are still similar to a regular chocolate chip cookie, they are different enough that they aren’t the same at all.
In fact, I was right. Bacon chocolate chip cookies ARE genius.
I know that you are eager to try these for yourself, so here is how I made them:
