Maple bacon cupcakes

[rikibeth]

So, in a fairly impromptu and last-minute road trip, I brought endlessautumn to visit cluegirl and aquila_dominus this weekend.

Somewhere in between listening to music, discussing endlessautumn's planned half-sleeve of Gustav Dore's illustrations for Paradise Lost, and reviewing our survival strategies for the inevitable zombie uprising, cluegirl mentioned that she wanted my help developing a recipe for maple bacon cupcakes. And, no, she didn't want to go to the internet, she wanted to do it herself.

I scolded her for not warning me before I left the house, because if she wanted to do it from the ground up, I'd have liked to have brought my textbooks.

We agreed that they should be made from a typical yellow butter cake base, with bacon inclusions. Since she had both grade B dark maple syrup and granulated maple sugar, we wanted to put maple in the cake as well as the frosting. I strongly recommended candying the bacon -- easy, just sprinkling it with sugar before cooking it. We theorized about replacing some of the butter with bacon grease, but in the end, the bacon didn't render enough fat to be useful.

Since I didn't have my textbooks, I grabbed her Betty Crocker cookbook off the shelf, and used the yellow cake recipe. I halved it because it said it made 36 cupcakes. It lied. We were not using the huge muffin tins either -- I could have sworn they were the 2 1/2" cups the recipe said. But the half recipe made 9. Anyway. Besides halving it, the only change I made was to substitute granulated maple sugar for 1/3 of the total white sugar, and then to stir in chopped bacon at the end. Well, okay, the recipe just said to beat all the ingredients together, and I decided that using a proper creaming method (first beat the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs & vanilla, then alternate the flour and the milk) was a better idea. But pretty much a straight-up yellow butter cake.

The buttercream was even simpler, because Betty Crocker had a maple variation in there already. 1/3 cup butter, 3 cups confectioners sugar, 1/2 cup maple syrup.

So, bake the cupcakes, cool them, frost them, and sprinkle their tops with chopped candied bacon.





You know you want some.

Comments

[mtfierce.livejournal.com]

This is made of win. I love the development - I don't know if I'd eat one (not big on bacon, all things considered - some part of my brain says it's "unclean") but I love the way it was approached and conquered!

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

This is why cluegirl wanted me in on the project -- I have the school training to know how to adapt baking recipes without spoiling the texture. I was also very glad to have the granulated maple as well as the maple syrup, because it meant I didn't have to do the far trickier job of replacing a solid sweetener with a liquid one in the cake part.

A similar sweet-and-salty cupcake for you might be a Snickers-themed one -- a peanut butter cupcake with a caramel filling and a fudge frosting, sprinkled with roasted peanuts and a few crystals of fleur de sel. No, that's not my invention, I got it from Elizabeth Falkner's cookbook.

[docscarabus.livejournal.com]

Yes I want them!!!

So you never told us how they came out.

I though maple bacon was an LA thing (we have maple bacon donuts). Are you east coasters stealing our stuff? STAY AWAY FROM OUR KOREAN TACOS! I miss lime rickeys. Do they still have lime rickeys?

[kebbykate.livejournal.com]

Did you happen to use maple bacon? We bought some recently and it was a)heavenly and b)made our house smell amazing for about a day.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

The recipe made nine cupcakes. There were four of us. There are five left on the plate. They were pretty fucking fantastic.

Maple is awfully east coast to me -- but possibly the maple bacon baked goods started in LA, I dunno.

I would like a Korean taco!

Jesus, the last time I remember having a lime rickey was... didn't they used to have them at Brigham's? I had a "rye rickey" cocktail at the Middlesex Lounge last month and it was delicious.

Guess who used to make comments about putting me in a bathtub of layered Jello to make a raspberry lime rickey.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

We used thick-cut applewood-smoked bacon and dredged it in maple sugar before cooking it in the oven. The caramelized drippings were otherworldly.

[docscarabus.livejournal.com]

They used to have them everywhere. They were like Boston's answer to the egg cream.

Why would putting you in a bathtub of layered jello make a raspberry lime rickey?

Hmmm...I'm going to guess Lorne.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Why would putting you in a bathtub of layered jello make a raspberry lime rickey?

Well, if it were raspberry and lime jello, and my NAME... and, right in one.

[docscarabus.livejournal.com]

Oh...duh! Now I feel dumb!

[docscarabus.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna be in Greenwich end of June! Maybe we can meet up!

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

That'd be great!