Today, we are overrun by cookies! I don’t think this is completely a bad thing, but it certainly isn’t good for our health!

Yesterday, Corran helped me make Polish Tea Cookies.  I realized that we never put up a good picture of the cookies after they were baked! So here is a picture. I think Corran was happy that I was taking pictures of his cookies this morning. 🙂

Now, I don’t usually make more than one type of cookie at a time, but Josh had been wanting to make maple bacon shortbread cookies since Tuesday. We had breakfast (Pancakes!) for dinner that day and somehow, we ended up making too much bacon! Is it possible to have too much bacon? Probably not. There are plenty of ways to use up leftover bacon!

I was a little iffy about using bacon in cookies though. Josh convinced me that it would taste good. So after dinner last night, we set out to make these cookies, kind of winging it in the process.

He found a recipe that used a box cookie mix as the base for bacon cookies, but we don’t want to use box mixes if we can help it and we didn’t have any anyway. I asked him what he thought of using shortbread as the base. Josh LOVES shortbread, so he jumped on this idea right away.

Since this was going to be a base, I was looking for a simple recipe. I ended up using a recipe from Food.com for Traditional Scottish shortbread. It only had 3 ingredients, sugar, flour, and butter.

I seriously think I went through about 2 pounds of butter when I was baking yesterday. I didn’t make just shortbread, but also baked Hawaiian sweet bread and an angel food cake loaf.

I used a 9 x 13 jelly roll pan. I wanted these to be pretty thick so they would hold together. I think they were 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch thick.

I kept an eagle-eye on these while they were baking. I didn’t want them to brown too much. They ended up being the perfect color after 25 minutes. I cut the sheet of shortbread in half so it would be easier to get out of the jelly roll pan.

For a chocolate topping, I just melted a bag of bittersweet Nestle chocolate chips in a large glass measuring cup in the microwave. If I had had more time, I might have attempted to temper the chocolate. But, since these were chocolate chips, I wasn’t sure if it was even worth trying to temper. Someday, I will learn how to temper chocolate. It is on my list! I am curious now though, can storebought chocolate chips even be tempered?

Why would we want to temper? Josh and I were kind of looking for a snap to the chocolate topping, not the softness of this chocolate once it had cooled. Tempered chocolate would be shiny (not dull like these ended up) and have a snap to it when it broke.

Before the chocolate cooled, I sprinkled on some candied bacon that Josh had made earlier.  Most of the recipes he found for candied bacon used uncooked bacon, so he had to tweak one of them a bit to use the cooked bacon we had left over.

Josh used a combination of maple sugar and maple pepper that we have in the spice cabinet. We love our spices and tend to have some rather exotic ones in there.

After I sprinkled on the bacon, Josh put the pan in the fridge so that the chocolate could cool.

I think the verdict is that these are really good! A lot better than I thought they would be. All my kids liked them, so it’s even kid-approved! I think Josh might be a little sad to come home from work and find some of them gone from the container… Ooops!

-Lynn

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