Matt's Awesome Stuff
Bacon Peanut Butter Cookies
Last updated: 16Apr2012
One of my proudest inventions. One day I decided to combine two of my favorite things. The result was every bit as delicious as I'd hoped. I'm doubtful that I was the first person ever to think of adding bacon to peanut butter cookies, but I was the first person I'd ever heard of doing it and possibly the person who popularized it most. I could've been rich. It's quite popular these days.
When I mention them to women, they often say "Eww, that's gross, those should not be together". When I mention them to men, they take a moment to let it sink in and immediately proclaim its awesomeness. All are converted upon tasting though. I've yet to meet anyone who would try them and didn't like them or want more. Even vegetarians. I used to show up at the bar with six dozen and start distributing them like I was the Bacon Angel.
The recipe is very simple. Take any peanut butter cookies, and then add mostly-cooked dice-up bacon to the batter. It's not rocket science. A few more details:
- Try to find unsalted bacon if you can. Else rinse the bacon before cooking. Bacon has too much salt.
- If the recipe calls for salt, don't add any. The bacon has enough.
- If the recipe has butter as an ingredient, don't add it. Instead add equivalent amount of bacon grease after you've fried you bacon. If you don't get enough grease to meet the butter/margarine equivalent, top off with butter.
- You want to slightly undercook the bacon, since you'll be baking it with the cookies. Cook it as minimally as you could tolerate eating, it will end up somewhere more cooked than that by the end.
- Bacon is expensive, and since you're just dicing it up there's no point in paying for nice strips. Check for boxes of "bacon ends" in your grocery, they're the end cutoffs that didn't fit into nice neat strips and they're 1/10th the price of normal bacon. $4 for 10 pounds (5kg). I throw the whole box worth into a roaster. There will be lots of bulk fat, just pick it out and throw it away. This also gives you a large enough supply of bacon to nibble on that you won't steal it away from the cookies.
- MOST IMPORTANT - Microwave the cookies before you eat them. The warmth brings out the flavor of the bacon 5x.
Do you have silly ladyfriends who insist that bacon and peanut butter do not belong together? Maybe their delicate girl-brains are not functioning properly or perhaps those particular women are immune to logic, but I have found varying success with the following:
Briefly consider standard contemporary theory of toy awesomeness. Toy vehicles are awesome. Toy robots are awesome. But a single toy transformer is far more awesome than having even a toy vehicle and a toy robot. Synergy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The same applies to bacon peanut butter cookies.
If they don't understand how awesome transformers are, they're not worth hanging out with. Find better ladyfriends.
If you're too lazy to find a normal peanut butter cookie recipe, here's the one I use, it creates rather heavy cookies:
- 3 cups flour
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup peanut butter
- 1 cup butter (substitute with bacon grease)
- 5mL salt (skip this)
- I think there's some baking soda or powder, I forget which or how much
- 3 eggs (?), I think it has eggs in it but I forget how many, 1-3.
Again it's not rocket science. Mix everything together, you'll want to add the flour slowly, last, or it'll be too hard to mix. Mix in the bacon by hand at the end, I put in equivalent to a whole pack, sometimes more, diced up. Bundle up balls about the size of a quarter, put them on a cookie sheet and then mash 'em down with a fork. I sprinkle sugar over top too. You bake them at, I forget, maybe 350'F, it tells me 12 minutes but I think that's too much, they get toasted by 12 so I shoot for 8 or 9.
If you've never baked anything before, you can't just start eating them right away. They have to sit around for 5 or 10 minutes before you scrape them off the cookie sheet or they'll be mush. The recipe is supposed to make 6 dozen, but it depends on how big you make the cookies. Oh, and cookies expand sometimes 200% while baking, so I usually only put them three across the narrow part of the cookie sheet.
While we're discussing baking bacon, do you hate vegetables? For example asparagus? Why not wrap them in a meaty bathrobe?
Bacon not your style? You could always get into confectionery decorating. Back in 2007 I "helped" prepare a bachelorette party. A little sketching, some scrap stainless, tin snips, and they ran out of time to decorate so I "helped" with that too.
Most people know better than to let me near their kitchen.