Bacon Brownies – How Are These Not Delicious?

Well, it had to happen eventually. It’s unrealistic for all 100 recipes I make this year to be knockouts so I shouldn’t be disappointed that the thirteenth recipe I made was a bust. The truth is, I had such high expectations for this one: Paleo Bacon Brownies.

When my friend Mandy posted a picture of a batch of dark chocolate brownies, sprinkled with crisp bacon pieces, I just knew I wanted to sink my teeth into that sweet-savory dessert. When I got the recipe and saw that these were grain-free and were also fortified with coffee, I wasted no more time and made a date with my oven.

Like sea salt caramel before it, bacon has now taken over as the darling ingredient in popular cuisine. Just stop by any cupcake shop, modern bakery or dessert bar and you’ll see at least one dessert laden with the always popular cured meat. America’s obsession with sweet and salty in one bite must be responsible for this bacon dessert craze. It’s not limited to dessert, mind you. I’ve seen bacon beer, bacon vodka, bacon candy and for the purists who don’t care to muddle their bacon with other ingredients but just want more bacon, there’s the ever popular bacon weave.

I am not immune to the bacon craze. I was raised in the south and enjoyed bacon at the breakfast table with some regularity. My family, being from East Tennessee, taught me at a young age that the only way to enjoy canned green beans is to cook them down in a few tablespoons of bacon grease for hours until little to no nutritional value remained. I have dabbled in bacon-for-dessert myself. My grandmother has a killer recipe for something we lovingly call S.O.B. – Special Occasion Bacon, which consists of thick-sliced bacon dredged in equal parts brown sugar and freshly cracked pepper and baked in the oven until you are left with essentially bacon candy. A few years ago, I rang in the new year with some friends, a glass of Champaign and a loaf of homemade bacon monkey bread. What better way to start a new year?

So, this recipe was a little disappointing but perhaps it’s because I have high bacony expectations? I should also confess that my all time favorite dessert would be the humble homemade brownie. I have very strong feelings about brownies. My bacon and brownie bias likely was a difficult hurdle to overcome.

Despite this recipe not ranking as highly as I would have liked, I think lots of other people would probably really like this dessert. It does have a lot to offer. To start, the texture is aces. It’s really a very fudgy brownie which is exactly the kind of brownie I like best. It’s also grain-free/Paleo, only sweetened with maple syrup and is highly caffeinated for those of you who enjoy a little pick me up with your dessert. This recipe is from Everyday Paleo which is a great cookbook for people looking for quick Paleo recipes that the whole family can enjoy. Here’s the recipe I used:

 8 ounces dark chocolate

1/2 cup reserved bacon fat

1/2 cup coconut oil or butter

6 eggs

4 tablespoons strong brewed coffee

4 tablespoons fine coffee grounds

1 cup Grade B maple syrup

1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

6-7 pieces of baked bacon

So, if you want to give it a try, even given my less-than-stellar personal review, here’s how it’s done.

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt the chocolate, bacon fat and the oil or butter. Make sure to stir often to prevent burning. This can also be done over a double boiler. Once melted, set aside to cool.

Mix the eggs and maple syrup together until well blended. Next, you can mix in the cooled chocolate mixture.

Make sure you start out with a large bowl! I had to transfer the mixture to a larger bowl at this point. This is when it pays to really read the instructions properly before starting to cook. Whoops!

Next, you can sift in the cocoa powder slowly and whisk into wet ingredients. Once cocoa is well blended, you can mix in the brewed coffee and coffee grounds.

Pour batter into an oiled 13×9 pan. Chop up your bacon slices and sprinkle on top. Bake for about 30 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

Remove from the oven, cool and slice up!

There you have it, Paleo Bacon Brownies. Maybe it’s harsh of me to say these aren’t delicious. They’re not my favorite but hey, they might just be your cup or tea… or piece of brownie for that matter. Truman Capote had great quote about failure that seems apropos:

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”                                  

Hey, I have 87 more recipes to go and I can’t let this one get me down. When it comes to bacon, I’d just assume enjoy it fresh out of the oven, or wrapped around a meatloaf. And when it comes to brownies, there’s nothing that can top my grandma’s extra dark chocolate variety… except maybe this gluten-free recipe from Elana’s Pantry.

Coffee, chocolate and bacon – a culinary trifecta of vices. You may have let me down this time, but I will have my revenge.

Eat Your Heart Out LARA – Homemade Energy Bars

You know that feeling you get when you see something so simple, so ingenious and it’s making someone a ton of money? When you say to yourself, “I can totally do that” and then you come back to reality, where laziness and apathy override any attempts at creativity and you say to yourself, “nah, I can just buy that.” 

I feel that way about most energy bars, particularly the ones sold at natural food stores. Those two ounce whole food bars are utter gold mines and I always feel resentful that I am paying for a few ingredients blended up, extruded out and beautifully packaged when I could totally make these at home and save a chunk of change. For years, I have been saying this about my favorite whole food snack, the Larabar.

The good folks at Larabar definitely know what they’re doing. Although their product line has expanded over the years, the simplest bar they make is their flagship line which boasts that each flavor has no more than nine ingredients and are little more than unsweetened fruits, nuts and spices. There are nearly 20 flavors to choose from, all of which are delicious configurations of these three ingredients – nuts, fruits and spices.

I have been convincing myself that I should make an attempt at homemade Larabars (or something close to them) for a long time but I always talk myself out of it, citing how long it would take and how many ingredients it would require. But a funny thing happened last night. Rather than making a batch of Paleo Bacon Brownies (which I do hope to get on sooner rather than later) Dan suggested that we make something out of the dates and coconut overloading our pantry. In a moment of weakness, I finally succumbed to the homemade energy bar.

I haven’t come across any recipes in my own cookbook collection for something close to an energy bar, so I did a quick internet search for “date paleo bar” and had over 2 million hits. Sheesh. Although not always the best approach to internet queries, I went with the first page on the list and it was perfect!  Thanks, Turtlewoman, for creating this great recipe. I modified it slightly, here’s the recipe we used:

1/3 cup raw cacao (or you can use regular cocoa powder)

1 1/2 cups raw, pitted Medjool dates

1/3 cup raw ground flax seed

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup raw almonds (soaked and dehydrated work too)

1/2 cup raw walnuts (soaked and dehydrated work too)

1/2 cup raw coconut shavings

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons raw, expeller pressed coconut oil

1/8 teaspoon sea salt (optional)

The original recipe called for dried fruit, such as Goji berries, cranberries or cherries but I swapped those out for coconut. I was going more for a chocolate coconut energy bar kind of a thing.

For this recipe, I used my food processor and also used the dry grain container on my Vitamix to grind the flax seeds into flax meal.

Flax seeds are interesting. If you eat them whole, you will barely get any nutritional benefit. The ol’, they went right through me routine. If you buy pre-packaged flax seed meal and expose it to air or light, it will become rancid and again, you will not benefit very much from that. My solution is to buy whole flax seeds and grind them up just before you use them. Even a tiny food processor will grind these fickle little seeds up for you. If you’re going to eat flax seeds, you might as well make it worth your while.

Steps one through three! Put the pitted dates into your food processor fitted with the s-blade attachment. If they are a little hard, I would add a tablespoon of warm water. Blend until a thick paste forms. Add chocolate, ground flax seeds, vanilla, cinnamon, coconut oil and salt. Pulse to blend thoroughly. Finally add the nuts and coconut. Pulse mixture until the nuts and coconut are to the size you desire. It should look something like this:

Pour mixture onto a wax paper lined pan. Press mixture down with a wooden spoon or spatula until you have a rectangle shape about 1/2 inch thick. Another option is to just ditch this “bar” shape and roll out little spheres. I created little lines with a knife so I could cut equal sized bars. Once the loaf is the size and shape you are looking for, transfer to the fridge or freezer to cool until firm.

Once firm, you can remove and slice up your energy bars. This made about 6 bars, weighing in about 2.5 ounces each. Store in an airtight container in your fridge. Keep each layer separated by a layer of wax paper to prevent sticking.

Boom! Energy Bars. These things are AMAZING and seriously taste just like the real deal, even better! This is closest to the Chocolate Coconut Chew bar but tastes so much better with the addition of a little sea salt to the mix. Since these also have flax seed meal, coconut and coconut oil, there are a lot of really good fats in these homemade energy bars. Not to mention cinnamon which helps promote circulation and raw cacao which has a little caffeine boost. I am a jerk for not attempting these sooner.

These whole food energy bars are also raw, vegan, gluten-free, paleo and bottom line.. super tasty! They do have a base of dates, so there’s a fair amount of sugar in these suckers but at least you get plenty of dietary fiber along for the ride. This recipe is a great basic guideline for tons of other flavor combinations. Let your imagination run wild!

I can’t believe how long I’ve been putting this off. This was REALLY easy, and I don’t mean like making Shrimp Stock-easy. This is like 10 ingredients, 10 minutes, really rewarding snack-easy.

Listen to yourself this time, you can totally do this!