Bacon & Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Okay.  My apologies.  I spent part of the week of my Meal-Tracking-Experiment talking up these delicious bacon cookies I’d made, but then launched into Ultimate Wedding Week before I could share the recipe with you!  I’m rectifying that right now.

The original recipe for this came from a Bon Appetit magazine that my mom gave me.  It originally specified bacon & raisin cookies, which would be a perfectly acceptable & fun breakfast cookie.  But no.  Momma wants Chocolate with her Bacon.  So we modified the recipe accordingly.

Ingredients (makes 18-20 cookies):

8 oz lean sliced bacon, diced

2 1/4 cups cake flour (I used 1/2 AP flour, and 1/2 wheat pastry flour)

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

1 cup packed brown sugar

2/3 cup white sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) light butter, room temp

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup oats

2/3 cup chocolate chips

 

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 375F. 

Sift together your dry ingredients, minus the oats.  I had some whole wheat pastry flour on hand, so I decided to use that for a lil’ added health benefit, and to add some “fluff” to these cookies.  Pastry flour is low in gluten, so it makes a nice fluffy batter—good for doughnuts, cookies, cupcakes….bad for bread.  Trust me.

Now add in your sugars, butter, vanilla, eggs, and oats, and beat until combined.  Then mix in your chocolate, and stick the bowl in the fridge, as the batter will be a bit sticky, and the cold will make it easier to mold cookies.

Now, you should make some bacon.  We have a microwave bacon rack that makes it nice & easy to cook the bacon, keep it up out of the grease, and then we can easily capture the grease for cooking later.

(My husband decided I should make an appearance on my blog.  Choppin’ bacon!  Which is sorta like Choppin’ Broccoli, but different.  You can see our microwave bacon tray in the background behind me.)

And for the ultimate in laziness, I chopped the bacon on the cookie sheet I’d be using to bake the cookies—no greasing of the cookie sheet needed! (In retrospect, I wouldn’t do that again.  That slight bit of bacon grease on the bottom of the cookies sorta overpowered the chocolate at times, and it made these cookies saltier than they should be.)

Mix the bacon in with the chilled dough, and chill for another 15 minutes.

Use a small ice cream scoop (2 oz) if you have it—if not, just use a couple cold tablespoons to form your dough.

Bake at 375F for approx 20 minutes.  If you have to use two cookie sheets, rotate the pans halfway through baking.

Then…proceed to NOM.

 NutriFacts:

Calories 90.9  

Total Fat 2.2 g   

Saturated Fat 0.9 g  

Polyunsaturated Fat 0.3 g   

Monounsaturated Fat 0.6 g  

Cholesterol 13.8 mg  

Sodium 35.3 mg  

Potassium 60.7 mg  

Total Carbohydrate 21.2 g   

Dietary Fiber 1.8 g   

Sugars 11.4 g  

Protein 2.3 g