Bacon Cinnamon Rolls

Apparently I am on a wicked sweet and salty kick with baked goods. First an apple cheddar pie, now this. Let's rewind shall we? Where did this all get started? I blame it on Alton Brown and Netflix. After a week of binge watching Good Eats, my mind was swirling with ideas. Especially after an episode where Alton makes bacon praline. Bacon praline! For snacking! What?? He's a horrible genius, he is.

So I came up with (what I thought at the time was) a genius idea for a bacon praline and salted caramel cake that substituted half of the butter in the cake itself with bacon fat. I might have been a little...overenthusiastic. I made the cake. I didn't like it. It turned out to be too much. Butter + bacon grease in the cake, butter in the swiss meringue buttercream, butter in the caramel sauce, all topped with a crapton of bacon praline. Too. Much. To. Handle. I had Phillip take the cake with him to work the next day and after the initial shock of realizing there was bacon on a cake, it did receive a warm reception from his coworkers. I still didn't really like it though.

Chinese Tea Eggs

There are certain memories I have of my childhood that are more vivid than most. I remember my mom used to spend an entire day stewing an astronomical amount of food to eat that same night and many more nights to follow. It was usually things like seaweed, tofu, different parts of a pig (ear, tongue), and occasionally she would throw in a few hard boiled eggs and let them soak up all the flavors the previous occupants of the stewing liquid imparted.

Those eggs weren't the exact same thing as these tea eggs, they weren't delicately cracked to create a perfect marbled pattern (my mom is far too practical for that), and I don't actually think the stewing liquid she used had any tea in it, but the other aromatics were very similar. The first time I made tea eggs myself, the smell elicited an overwhelming feeling of childhood nostalgia. So even though they're not the exact same thing I ate growing up, they're pretty darn close.

Cinnamon Sugar Challah

There are two things that terrify me in the kitchen. Not just regular terrify, but more like throw-a-temper-tantrum-like-a-little-girl-then-have-nightmares-about-it terrified.

The first is cheese sauce, as in mac & cheese cheese sauce. Depending on what cheese I buy, how I grate it, the time of day, and the alignment of the planets, I have a 75/25 chance that the sauce will separate into a curdly mess. Those are not good odds. I've tried bechamel based sauces, custard sauces, they have all broken. And sometimes, I make a wildly successful, silky smooth cheese sauce only for it to break while baking in the oven. Persnickety cheese, you are my worst enemy.

The second is any type of yeasted bread. I'm just not good at making them. Though unlike cheese sauce, with bread I am getting better. I can see where I'm going wrong at times. After loaf upon loaf of dense bricks that never rose correctly, I can tell when the water is too hot and will kill the yeast, I can tell when there's too much flour, and I think I'm realizing now that I should store yeast in the freezer. It still terrifies me though. We have a fickle relationship.