Bacon & Garlic Chocolate Cake

I've been thinking about this for a long time, maybe two or three weeks—how could I improve on my bacon chocolate cake? See, about a year ago I was inspired to make a bacon chocolate cake (the same inspiration also led to beer-batter, deep-fried White Castle sliders and beer-batter, deep-fried bacon, both pictured below).


So for two weeks I've been planning how to approach making a new bacon chocolate cake. And my answer—add garlic.

Chocolate is good, bacon is good, and garlic is good, right? So why not throw all that goodness together? I decided on frying chopped garlic and garlic chips to garnish the chocolate cake along with the bacon. This time I also went with a thinner, low sodium bacon. I also used a cast iron skillet as a bacon press to ensure that the bacon wouldn't curl and so I could render most of the fat. Then I let the bacon rest and dried it of excess oil.

For the garlic I roasted two heads and chopped and sliced a third. Using the bacon drippings I fried the chopped and sliced garlic.

For the chocolate cake, I used a standard chocolate cake recipe without doing anything special. It was from scratch though, and not out of some Betty Crocker/Duncan Hines box, although wouldn't it be ironic using one of those classic Americana box cakes and bastardizing it with all sorts of weird things like I was about to do?

For the chocolate ganache, again I use a recipe. But I separated out the chocolate ganache into two parts so that I could blend some with the roasted garlic to be used for the middle layer.

Assembling the cake was a bit of an ordeal, but in the end there it stood, triumphant. A bacon & garlic chocolate cake worthy of This Is Why You're Fat. A chocolate cake topped with fried garlic and bacon bits with an inner layer of roasted garlic chocolate ganache.

I'm not going to lie to you—it was weird. Like sex with an ill-advised hook-up weird. What seemed like a good idea in the end didn't turn up like everything for which I had hoped. It wasn't bad, and surely was edible. I finished the sizable piece I cut for myself. But some of the elements didn't work as well in the end. The bacon was still good, even better than last time, but there should have been more of it and less of the garlic.

The garlic was overpowering. Perhaps it was a little too burned. Deep-fried, thinly sliced onion petals would have been a better fit maybe. The roasted garlic chocolate ganache was probably unnecessary. I think it could still work, but I would used milk chocolate next time and add more sugar, and reduce the amount of roasted garlic.

I could see something like this being served at the Stinking Rose which specializes in garlic dishes. But this cake was akin to their garlic ice cream, which while good, still makes you wish it was just plain vanilla. Or in this case, just a regular bacon chocolate cake. I'll probably get the hankering to make another bacon chocolate cake next year, so in the meantime if you have any suggestions, please pass them along. Apparently it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and that good thing was garlic.