Chewy Maple Bacon Cookies is the recipe you’re going to want to make every Autumn to enjoy on the couch with cozy movies or TV shows, with a cup of tea or coffee or even at breakfast time when something sweet is what you crave. They are the taste of my childhood breakfasts in cookie form – when the syrup from my pancakes would seep onto the bacon on my plate. This is salty-sweet at its finest.
The nature of these cookies is that they stay chewy and soft, rather than hard & crispy. For me, this is essential in a cookie… I’ve never been a big fan of a hard biscuit unless I’m dunking it in my tea. This texture combined with the bits of bacon that are chewy in some places and crispy in others is just dreamy. The savouriness of the bacon with the sweet cookie and the sprinkling of sea salt on top is an explosion of happy flavours. This might just be my new favourite cookie recipe!
Chewy Maple Bacon Cookies are pretty easy to make. It’s just a standard cookie recipe with the added step of frying some bacon before you start. You’ll want to make sure you have either a hand-held or stand mixer to cream the butter unless you’re brave & strong enough to do that by hand. You’ll also want to bake these in batches, so be sure to allot enough time. It’s also worth saying that you definitely need streaky bacon. Normal rashers aren’t going to work here or at least they won’t be the same.
When scooping out your cookie dough, be sure to make them relatively small – about the size of a ping-pong ball and give them some room to spread out as they bake. How many cookies you end up with will have everything to do with how big they are when you scoop them out, but you should get at least 15 to 20 if not a full two dozen. Let’s get started!
Ingredients
- 200g sliced unsmoked streaky bacon
- 300g self-raising flour
- 100g plain white flour
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt flakes
- 175g salted butter, softened
- 150g soft light brown sugar
- 100g white caster sugar
- 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 50ml maple syrup
- Additional sea salt flakes for sprinkling
Method
- To begin, start by frying the bacon. Put the bacon slices into a frying pan with about an inch of water over medium-high heat. As the water cooks off, the fat will render and this will help your bacon to crisp up nicely as it fries. Once the water has evaporated, fry the bacon, pushing it around the pan with a spatula and scraping the bacony coating off the bottom of the pan as needed to help it crisp up. When it’s crispy and quite bronzed, remove it to a plate lined with paper towels to cool.
- Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° Fan / 350°F. Line two large baking trays with baking paper and set aside.
- Add the self-raising flour, plain white flour and salt to a mixing bowl and stir to combine with a wire whisk.
- Cream together the butter with both kinds of sugar in a large mixing bowl with a hand mixer or in the bowl of a stand mixer with the paddle attachment until it’s all combined and smooth.
- Add the eggs, vanilla extract and the maple syrup. Continue beating until well mixed, dark & runny.
- Add the dry ingredients and little at a time, continuing to beat until just mixed and then set the dough int the fridge for about 10 minutes or so until firm.
- Crumble or chop the cooked bacon and gently fold it into the cookie dough until just incorporated.
- Use a spoon to scoop out little lumps of cookie dough about the size of a cherry tomato onto a lined baking sheet. Sprinkle each mound of cookie dough lightly with sea salt flakes. Bake in the oven for 8 to 10 minutes or until the cookies are starting to look done, but are still a bit doughy.
- If you want the cookies to be perfectly round, simply place a round glass over each cookie while they’re still piping hot and swirl around the edge in a circle. You are not trying to cut the cookies, so make sure the glass fits around them or bake the next batch smaller. Do this for each one while they’re still hot to make them perfectly round.
- Bake the cookies in batches until you’ve used all your dough. When they come out of the oven, leave them to cool for 10 minutes or so on the tray before transferring to a wire wrack to cool completely.
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