Bacon Cups!

I had a little shin-dig open house type party yesterday. Ill post more pictures after this, but one of the creations I made for this was a first in what I hope will be a long experimentation with bacon and muffin pans.

Bacon Cups

Approx Prep: 15 Minutes
Approx Cook: 25-45 Minutes (depending on how much bacon you can cook at a time)

This will make 12 cups

1 Package of Bacon (at least 12 slices)
2 Boxes of Cornbread Muffin Mix (I used Jiffy)
2/3 cup Milk
2 Eggs
2 Italian Sausages  

Spray a 12 cup muffin pan with Pam or other baking spray. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees.

One of the few pictures of me cooking... Gwyn was helping me out.

In a fry pan, cook bacon. I really like crispy bacon. For this you do not want crispy bacon. You want limp, possibly undercooked bacon (you will get the hang of the consistency you want after a few tries at the later steps).

Mmmmm... Bacon!

When bacon is just starting to hold shape, remove from pan, pat dry, and immediately line the edges of a cup with a strip of bacon. The bacon will continue to cook a little after you take it out, if you leave it out too long it will harden in to strips. This is a little hard as the bacon will still be very hot. And covered in grease. This mean you may burn yourself. Try not to.

The Start of Bacon Cups!

 While bacon is cooking (or in between sets of bacon) prepare the Cornbread muffin mix according to directions. (Mix eggs, milk and mixture together. It should be lumpy). Once you get the bacon in a cup, using a small spoon, fill the center of the bacon ring with Cornbread mix. Don't over fill, as we will be adding more stuff to it in a bit, and the Cornbread will rise a little in the oven. At this point if any of your bacon strips broke, or look funny, use the cornbread mix to push the rebellious bacon against the sides of the pan.

Once the bacon is done cooking, cook the Italian Sausage in the bacon grease. This is where you can have a little fun. If you have never cooked large sausages before, and more importantly if you have never cut a sausage, and then cooked it... you can make some funky looking pieces of meat. It you slice the sausage in half (length wise) and then start to cook it, the inside will puff up, and the casing will not, so you get weird looking crescent sausage pieces. Once these are browned, you can take them out of the pan and cut them up some more to get weirder shapes. Basically cook the sausage. If you want you can cook it normally and then cut it in to strips... but this way was more fun.

Silly Sausage

Once the sausage is done, pat dry it to remove the grease. Then insert sausage pieces in to the center of the Cornbread.

You don't have to use tooth picks. I was worried that the sausage would fall, it did not.

 Once everything is full and complete, stick pan in the oven for 13-15 minutes, or until the tops of the cornbread start to brown. 

OVEGLOVE!! Yeah Grandma!

Remove from oven, let cool a little, remove from pan. Enjoy.

Surprisingly Good.

 Yes they were good. But work still needs to be done here. In this case, you ended up getting two bites of bacon/cornbread and then a bite of spicy sausage. I eventually added sausage bits to the batter, but then the batter fell apart... This is only the first test in what I am sure is going to be a bacony-goodness trail.