Bacon Cake

You know you want it. Yes, it's time for me to make a bacon cake. I'm going to Thanksgiving dinner at one of the grad students place. We've had many discussions about bacon, so it seemed just fitting.
I found a recipe online which sounded good and I had all the ingredients. Here it is.
Bacon-Brown Sugar Coffee Cake

6-8 slices bacon (regular or sugar or maple-cured, but NOT peppered or jalapeño or garlic or anything you wouldn't want in cake)
2 sticks butter, softened
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
1 cup sour cream
2 cups AP flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/3 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1/3 cup uncooked rolled oats

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour the bundt pan.

Fry the bacon slices until crisp. Set aside to cool and drain.

Cream together butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and sour cream. Sift together flour, baking powder, and baking soda. Stir in to creamed mixture and blend.

Crumble or chop bacon slices into little pieces. Add dark brown sugar and oats, and mush together with your fingers to get the bacon and sugar blended and clumped with the oats. It will be a loose mixture, but you want the three elements to be well-acquainted with each other.

Put half the cake batter into the bundt pan (you'll have to put globs of it in--it's a thick batter), then top with half the bacon mix. Put on the rest of the batter, and top with the remmaining bacon mixture.

Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, until done (test with a toothpick or your finger). Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before eating. If you let it cool for a few hours, the cake itself seems to taste a little sweeter.


The preparation of the cake went pretty much as described. I cooked up a bit more bacon than called for, since I knew the cats were going to come and beg. (They did) The bacon/sugar/oat mixture didn't stick together like it said, but instead made a sort of loose bacon streusel mix.
There was a bit of collateral damage when I tried to remove the cake from the pan. The bacon struesel had stuck to the sides and the cake didn't pull out cleanly. I covered it with some frosting so it didn't look quite as bad.
The cake was pretty rich, and tasted sort of like a cake doughnut that had sat on a plate with some maple syrup and bacon. It was tasty, and the grad students liked it. As for me, I don't have the metabolism that I did when I was a grad student so I'd better just stay away from bacon cake as a matter of principal.