It's the Yeast I Can Do

Triple chocolate bacon cake, 08.06.12

“You don’t have to get me anything,” he says. “Just make me a dessert you think I’d like,” he says. This, from the guy whose three favorite sentences inside the kitchen or out are: 1) “We could make a bread pudding out of this,” 2) “Ooh, but with a nice ganache…,” and 3) “You could deep-fry that.”

I found an old piece on Girlichef that looked like it might suit alright — chocolate and bacon, after all, are a pretty winning combination these days — but as I read through the post, I realized the lady wasn’t happy with the cake, the buttercream, or the bacon; for those keeping score, that’s all three constituent parts. So I took some liberties…

I used my favorite Smitten Kitchen chocolate cake recipe (one bowl and three sticks of butter? sold) for the base, swapping her cinnamon for espresso powder. Then I piled on my go-to buttercream, adapted from Baked Bree to include my secret ingredient and a little extra stiffener, due in part to distraction and in part to ameliorate the over-softened butter. I topped it with the ganache from Baked Explorations’ chocolate coffee cake, aka my birthday cake to self last year. And then, you know, because that’s not rich enough, candied bacon. It’s as close to writing a recipe as I’ve come, and someday when it’s not two days late and two hours past my bedtime, maybe I’ll get around to adding it to this post. Stay tuned.

P.S. Two pounds of butter, one pound of bacon, 8 ounces of Valrhona.

P.P.S. Bonus points if you get the Breaking Bad reference without clicking through.

P.P.P.S. It’s gone.