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- The mascarpone was incorporated into a lemon chiffon cake with strawberry & mascarpone filling, of which Emily has photos. It was my first time making a chiffon style cake and it turned out awesome, and I want to flavor more things with lemon zest because of how delicious it was.
- The remaining 2 gallons of cream went south shortly thereafter and were rendered into cultured butter. It took pretty much a whole weekend and my freezer is so full of butter, you have no idea.
Now, bacon toffee:
I stayed home sick today after waking up to the third straight day of a migraine. Being a neurotically industrious person (no really), I decided to do stuff in the kitchen in my less-than-coherent state.
First I caramelized some onions, because I felt like I should make them and save them for later or something:
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Then I set to work on the toffee:
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Mise en splat
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Toffee is pretty much the worst thing you could eat, ever. It's butter and sugar melted together with a pinch of salt and vanilla, then allowed to recrystallize. Hence the gross picture of butter & sugar melting in the pot.
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In case you forgot what bacon looked like, or if you thought we hadn't posted enough pictures of the horrible things we do to bacon.
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Butter & sugar boiling
The ensuing steps in the process happened rather quickly, and my alternate photographer was sleeping on the couch, so I don't have pictures of me stirring the crumbled bacon and vanilla extract into a pot of 300F bubbling sugar and fat. You'll just have to imagine it as being rather warm and dangerous.
I poured the mix onto parchment paper on a baking sheet:
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After it cooled (and I broke off bits of the edges that cooled first for quality control), I punched it some and put the pieces in a ziploc bag to keep humidity from making it soft and sticky.
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Mmmm, shards of death.
Verdict: Tasty and kind of weird. Mostly tastes like a medium-to-dark caramelized toffee, and the bacon flavor only surfaces upon encountering a piece embedded in the candy.
Definitely a novelty, and I'm trying to figure out who I can get to help eat this batch, because a pound of toffee is a lot of candy.