Bacon and Choc Chip Cookies

I made these tonight. My recipe is below:

This recipe makes about 45 smallish cookies.

– 250g butter
– 1/2 cup brown sugar
– 1/2 cup white sugar
– 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence
– 1 egg
– 3 cups plain flour
– 1 teaspoon baking soda
– 150g dark chocolate chips (The original suggests a fair bit more chocolate – and you can use white/milk chocolate or a combination if you prefer. This time I went with milk chocolate)
– 350g short cut bacon (I like to use rashers as the melty fat parts are the best 😀 Previous recipes suggest ~1kg, but that’s rather excessive. I’ve found 6 rashers to be a good guide.)

(You may also want to consider using almond or hazelnut essence, or real nuts.)

First:
Dice  about four of the bacon rashers into small pieces
Cut fairly large slices out of the remaining two, squares roughly 2 to 3cm. These will be used to top the cookies.
Fry, in a few separate batches, in a dry nonstick pan on high heat until well cooked and a little crispy. The topping ones you want to be especially crisp
Put on absorbent paper to get rid of excess oil.
Put in fridge while doing other stuff.

Second:
Melt the butter slowly. Add the sugars, egg and vanilla essence. Stir until it’s consistent.
Add the flour/baking soda and stir until it’s a wettish dough.
Add the chocolate and stir until it’s all through the mixture.
Add the bacon and stir again.
Basically you want a consistent mixture of all the ingredients after you make the dough.

Third:
Preheat the oven to 180.
Make balls of dough and stick them on a cookie tray, evenly spaced out. The balls don’t need to be very large. Squoosh the balls a bit so they’re a little flat.
Put them in the oven and cook them until they’re golden brown, this will take around 15-20 minutes depending on the size of your cookies.
Cool them for a while on a cooling tray before eating.

I like to top my cookies with a glaze comprised of icing sugar, vanilla essence and cinnamon. For a batch of 45 cookies you might be looking at around half a cup of icing sugar. The ratio of these ingredients is up to personal preference. Then put your bacon topping on.

Original recipe can be found here though the blog it originally appeared in no longer exists.

Tonight’s endeavour went a lot faster than some of my other cookie-making attempts, and the results were a bit different from the last lot. The batter seemed ‘creamier’ than usual when I started forming cookies out of them and might have warranted a little time in the fridge to firm up. I also was a little short on the bacon so they don’t quite hit you with that bacon-ny impact. Maybe if I made these more often I’d get better at making them 🙂

Lucky

Well, supposedly DecemBlog has started and I’ve yet to put anything up for it! Tonight I have assessment on a bunch of art pieces from throughout the term so I’ll be pretty much calling those artworks ‘done’ whether I like it or not. And then maybe they’ll make their way here 🙂

In the mean time, here’s a find I made yesterday. It’s been two years since I found my last four-leafed clover but on the way home yesterday I found two. And another two two-leaved clovers that appeared to be legitimately short one leaf. It feels good to get my average back on track.

Mah Jong Scoring

In an effort in getting my head around the scoring rules of Japanese Mah Jong (which are generally more restrictive than the rules I’m accustomed to playing with) I’ve been putting together a few scoring sheets. Here’s one, listing the Yaku (valid winning hands). It’s a simplified table comprised of the information from Wikipedia’s page designed to fit on one A4 page.

Click here for the list

Excel crashed part way through me formatting this and although it auto-recovered the file, when I saved that auto-recovered file over the old one it corrupted it! Argh. At least I had an older branched version of the file saved so I didn’t have to start over from scratch.