Maple Bacon Eclair- Winner!

Today is going to busy on the blog. Feast or famine, eh?

I need to celebrate that I won for a second year in a row at the Bacon Camp Throw Down, here in Columbus.

It's a cooking contest where the ingredient of choice is bacon and there are categories, sweet, savory, homemade and fake bacon. There wasn't a fake bacon entry this year. But the sweet category tends to get petty heavy with competition. Well, I took the prize; a nifty bag of bacon theme swag.

What did I do?

Pate a chou with rendered minced bacon. That was filled with a maple pastry cream (not pudding) topped with milk chocolate bacon ganache and then a sprinkle of crunchy turbinado bacon crunch. It took a fair amount of trail and error to get this just right. I'd go all Cook's Illustrated on you. Why the bacon needed rendered. How tasters liked the maple better than vanilla or elderflower filling. How bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate overpowered the bacon flavor, so milk chocolate was the go to flavor. And the topping...it took 4 tries to get what I wanted.

Minis for the attendees. They were so cute!

But I get bragging rights. And yeah, I'll talk you through it if you really want to make them yourself. Hit me up.

I have to blog about my first Daring Bakers' Challenge candy making endeavors shortly too. That's been keeping me occupied this month too.