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.