Cookie Baking Day with Chef Mitch

The other day my son Mitch came to me with an idea for a cookie, a Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookie. I was intrigued by this idea and decided that we needed to give it a try, mostly because of my family's shared belief that bacon goes with everything. And who doesn't love a Chocolate Chip Cookie!

We hit up our local Target store, not so much because we grocery shop there, but because my daughter had a job interview there and I figured Mitch and I could shop while she had her interview. The whole kill 2 birds with one stone kind of thing. She got the job, by-the-way!

So we came home armed with Bacon and Chocolate CHUNKS. Mitch saw the chunks next to the chips and decided it was time to go big or go home in the chocolate arena. Have I mentioned lately how much I like this kid!?

Okay so I started this recipe by cooking off some diced bacon:

Then I gathered the necessary ingredients to make the Toll House Cookie recipe from the back of the Chocolate CHUNKS bag. And yes, I forgot to put the Vanilla Extract out on the counter before I started, but it was in the cookies, I promise:

Then Mitch and I got busy mixing up the cookie dough. He's getting pretty good at using the KitchenAid!

Here is the dough with the bacon added:

I used my handy dandy cookie scoop and made some nice dough balls on the parchment lined pan. Mitch normally does this part, but today I took over the scooping duty-he has grip strength issues and the scoop was being uncooperative. 

The baked cookies fresh from the oven. You can see the little bacon bit right on the top of this one:

I let them cool a bit then put two on a plate and took them to Mitch, who was spending his baking/cooling time playing on the PS3:

The cookie delivery:

Of course Mitch would never eat cookies on Mom's brand new sofa so he moved over to the dining table for the tasting of his new cookie creation:

Mitch proclaims the Bacon Chocolate Chunk Cookie to be delicious!!!

If you decide you want to try these at home, I just took the Toll House Cookie recipe off the bag and added cooked bacon. Not rocket science. My thoughts on the cookie- It needed more bacon. No, seriously, it was good but could have used more bacon flavor. I looked at quite a few recipes online for this cookie-and yes, there are many. Some called for Maple flavoring, some for bourbon and one even had some of the rendered bacon fat added into the dough but I thought our first try at this should be taking an existing recipe and just adding the bacon and seeing if it was even edible.  I also think they'd be delicious with some candied pecans, because I love candied pecans!

So there we have it, a successful cookie baking day with my favorite young Chef!

Happy Friday Everyone! Have a Wonderful Weekend!!