Mmm…. maple. This month’s bakers challenge over at the Daring Kitchen was maple mousse in an edible (preferably bacon) container. Wanting to think outside of the box, or bacon cup, I decided to incorporate bacon into a thumbprint cookie and fill that with maple mousse. Afterall, I am Cookie Kelly.
I made the maple mousse first since like me, it needed some time to chill, though I do most of my chilling on the couch and the mousse did it’s thing in the refrigerator. There is one thing that really disgusts me (well, there’s many things) and it’s gelatin. Powdered animal bones used to thicken food makes me want to vomit. Nonetheless, I picked up a box of it at the grocery store and got to work.
The mousse was easy to make and I hear it tasted quite nice. I tried a spoonful of it but left it at that since I’m disgusted by gelatin, but mostly I didn’t eat more because I was getting over a cold and my sense of taste was off. My other senses were out of whack too. I swore I smelled chicken salad in my kitchen one morning and thought maybe something had gone bad in the fridge. Turned out that it was just the cup of coffee that I brewed. It may have tasted like chicken salad too but I couldn’t tell.
Next order of business was the edible container. Bacon in baked goods seems to be the trend these days; salty and sweet. Well, I’m not a huge fan of bacon, particularly because it’s quite unhealthy and apparently kind of expensive (I never bought bacon before!), but I thought making it a bit sweeter by candying it would cut down on the surprise factor of finding it in a cookie. So I used David Lebovitz’s recipe and chopped the strips into very small pieces, which I added into a slightly modified version of a thumbprint cookie recipe on allrecipes.com. A few of the thumbprints were filled with blackberry jam before topping with the maple mousse.
Friends, family, and coworkers had a hard time discerning the bacon bits in the cookie. Most of them would not have known that that was the secret ingredient if I had kept it a secret. I’m doubtful that I’ll use that recipe again though. I guess I wouldn’t be completely opposed to trying bacon in a cookie again, but I’ll leave out the gelatin components.
All Things Crafty 