It feels so wrong posting a picture of this bacon cake on a blog that is pretty much dedicated to me being healthy and a vegetarian…but this is the cake that I made for my friend/coworker’s birthday yesterday.

Martha Stewart versatile vanilla cake, a box of Trader Joe’s chocolate frosting, and $4.50 worth of bacon from the deli around the corner (I gave my intern money to get it for me because I have zero experience ordering meat…) I was trying to figure out how to customize my friend’s cake when I was reminded that she likes bacon, so I thought I’d put bacon IN the cake.

A google search for “bacon layer cake” brought results that were mainly birthday cakes for dogs, so I improvised. Bottom cake layer, then spread chocolate frosting thinly on both layers. I crumbled bacon over half of it, put the top layer on, then frosted the top and jammed more bacon into the bacon half (half was left bacon-free because I am not the only vegetarian that I work with) and frosted the sides (done in a way so that there would be no accidental bacon transfer to the non-bacon half of the cake.)

I can only speak to the baconless half of the cake, but it came out really well! The cake itself was really dense, which I liked, and not overly sweet, which was good in contrast to the super sweet, chocolatey frosting. The bacon-eating crowd seemed to enjoy their meaty cake as well. And I got to have a lot of strange conversations in the kitchen at work as I assembled it.

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