Loco Cocoa Cake!

This post is devoted to my incredibly supportive, loving, intelligent and crazy dad. Today is his birthday! Happy birthday, Dad! 

I can thank him for my competitiveness, my need to challenge myself, and my spontaneity. He's the one that runs beside me, gives me a glance and the next thing you know we're sprinting until one of us burns out. He's there 10:00 in the morning on my birthday doing a shot of tequila with me (though we opted for 10pm this time around). He's the one you can say "I kind of feel like going on a road trip," and his response is, "Which car should we take?" And I can always count on him walking through the door with his enthusiastic, "Hey Mandy May!" every day when he gets home from work.

All in all, my dad is a pretty awesome guy.

And that means he needs an awesome cake. One that's not usual, a little surprising, and definitely keeps you on your toes.

Two years ago for his birthday I made what I like to call "The Man Cake," which was a cake made with his own Pumpkin Ale topped with a bacon buttercream, made with bacon fat and butter. Oh, yeah. I did that. And I topped it with crumbled bacon.

Since The Man Cake was pretty out of the box, I needed to come up with something that was at least comparable this year.

I decided on a chocolate cake, soaked in Patron Xo Cafe Dark Cocoa tequila, filled with cayenne-chocolate custard and topped with a spicy dark chocolate ganache. Loco Cocoa, no?

The cake was made from my favorite chocolate cake recipe, cut into four layers, and doused in the tequila. I filled the cake with my standard chocolate custard recipe with about a 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne added in (we like things spicy! Adjust according to your tastes). I frosted the cake with a dark chocolate ganache that also had cayenne and a little cinnamon added. The cake was decorated with shards of chocolate sprayed with edible gold and amber sugar.

I'm very blessed to have such a wonderful dad who keeps up with my crazy life and supports me every step of the way. Hope you had a great day, Dad!

"And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers..." Malachi 4:6

Chocolate Bacon Brownies

Woah 2012! How are everyone's resolutions going? The gym is a zoo three days a week still, so I guess they're going strong. Speaking of which, have you ever watched animals using a treadmill? It's pretty awkward. Did you see what I did there? ;)

Anyway, I hope your new year has started off great. I don't know what the resolutions were like in your household, but the morning of our new year started out with us eating as many cinnamon buns as we could until we found a hidden lucky coffee bean. It's going to be a good year.

What? You didn't do that?

My family decided to start a new food tradition this year since last year's pork and cabbage and lentils seemed to give us NO luck. So this year Dad presented our new tradition, loosely based on an idea from Norway (can someone tell me where he finds this stuff? I'd like to see the Google searches on that man's phone): an almond is placed in a pot of rice pudding, and whoever gets the almond in their dish is supposed to have luck the rest of the year. I say loosely because rice pudding is not a favorite in our household, especially if raisins are involved, and my brother now deathly allergic to almonds (looking back this sounds like a terrible idea...). And since we're American and not Norwegian, we replaced the rice pudding with cinnamon buns and the almond with a coffee bean. HELL YES.

To make a long story short, my older brother ended up getting the coffee bean, and has had the worst luck of all of us ever since (apparently accidentally shaving off your beard is super tragic in the man-world).

So if you're looking for more luck this year, I say ditch the resolutions and start shoveling baked goods down your throat. And a half pound of bacon. And you should start with these Chocolate Bacon Brownies.

I apologize for the quality of this photo. The big fancy camera decided to be stubborn so my cracked and slowly dying phone saved the day. 

These brownies start with a chocolate cookie, pretzel and bacon fat crust. Stay with me....The crust is topped with bacon and chocolate chip brownies, and the whole thing is covered in dark chocolate bacon ganache with chopped bacon and crushed chocolate cookies. If that doesn't ooze luck I'm not sure what does. Let's start this year off right, folks.

Chocolate Bacon Brownies
Chocolate Pretzel Crust
1 cup ground pretzels
1 cup ground chocolate wafer cookies
3 Tbsp bacon fat
3 Tbsp melted butter
1 Tbsp sugar

Toss all ingredients together and press into the bottom of a greased 9x13" baking dish.

Bacon Brownies (Brownies adapted from Hershey's)
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp espresso powder dissolved in 1 Tbsp hot water
2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup cocoa powder (I use Valrhona)
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 pound bacon, cooked and chopped (1/4 cup reserved for topping)
1/2 cup milk chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Melt butter and sugar in microwave on high for 2 minutes. Stir to combine and let cool slightly. Mix in eggs one at a time and stir in espresso and vanilla. Add cocoa, flour, baking powder and salt, and mix until just combined. Fold in bacon and chocolate chips, and pour batter over chocolate pretzel crust. Bake 30-35 minutes.

Bacon Ganache
1 cup dark chocolate chips
1 cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp bacon fat
1/4 cup bacon, chopped and cooked (optional)
1/4 cup ground chocolate wafer cookies (optional)

Place chocolate chips in heat safe bowl. In the microwave or on the stove, heat heavy cream until just before it boils. Pour cream over chocolate and let sit for a couple minutes. Slowly whisk chocolate and cream mixture until chocolate is melted and smooth, then stir in bacon fat. Pour on top of cooled brownies. Top with bacon and chocolate cookies, if desired.




Or go eat a salad or something.