Apple-Pecan-Bacon Maple Brown Sugar Cookies

This recipe is an adaptation from Sally’s Baking Addiction who consistently churn out awesome cookie recipes. When I first saw this recipe, I knew I had to try it out but I thought that maple and brown sugar might end up being too sweet. So naturally I had to experiment and add things to it. What goes well with maple? Well, hello bacon. Fancy meeting you here.

Ingredients for cookies:

• 2.25 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 0.5 teaspoon salt
• 0.5 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup brown sugar (both dark or light brown sugar will work fine)
• 1 egg
• 0.33 cup maple syrup (make sure to use the real thing and not breakfast syrup)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon maple extract
• 1 cup additions (you choose any of these or combination of them: chopped pecans, chopped apple chips, chopped cooked-to-crisp bacon)

Ingredients for icing:

• 1 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 0.25 cup maple syrup (make sure to use the real thing and not breakfast syrup)
• 0.75 cup powdered sugar
• 0.5 teaspoon maple extract
• pinch of salt

Directions:

1. Combine dry ingredients in a medium bowl: flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside. In a separate bowl, beat together the butter and brown sugar until smooth. Just in case you’re wondering, beat them with a mixer because we’re baking here, not like punishing anyone. Add the egg and beat until combined. Add the maple syrup and both extracts and beat them once more until everything is well-combined.
   
2. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet and mix them until combined and the cookie dough comes together. At this point, I separate my dough into two or three roughly equal parts. This is where you can go crazy and be creative. For some of the dough, I mix in chopped pecans. For another portion, I mix in chopped apple chips (make sure you get the crispy kind, not the floppy dried apples although maybe that will work too). Yet for the piece de resistance, I mix in…. (cue angelic choir) bacon! Oh I have also had success combining apples and bacon. Yum.
   
3. Put the dough into the refrigerator for 30 minutes to 1 hour to chill. This will make it easier to portion out but if you don’t have time, that’s fine too. It may just get messier and you have more cookie dough to lick off spoons. But please don’t because raw egg. 😉 After portioning out to about 1.5 tablespoon-size for each cookie, freeze the dough balls for a few hours.
4. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350°F and line baking sheets with parchment paper. This dough is very creamy so I don’t recommend silicone baking mats. Those mats will make the butter pool and cause the cookies to spread out too much. Place the cookies about 2 inches apart (I get about 9 cookies per baking sheet) and bake for 16-18 minutes. This is longer bake time than recommended but I do this because I normally freeze my cookie doughs so it does take a little while longer but I prefer this method because it produces fat, plump, chewy cookies. And that makes happy, fat, plump Yoyo. Once the cookies are out of the oven, cool them completely before icing.
5. For the icing, melt the butter and maple syrup together in a small sauce pan. Drizzle this mixture into powdered sugar, while whisking vigorously (your cardio for the day). Add a pinch of salt and the maple extract, whisk some more until everything is well-combined. You can drizzle this over the cooled cookies using the whisk, fork, finger, whatever is most convenient to you. If you want that pizzazz of presentation, you can pour this into a ziploc bag, cut a tiny corner out and drizzle with more precision. One thing to note: for the cookies with bacon, I found that I wanted a little more hit of saltiness so I sprinkle the top with some coarse salt. But even if you don’t have it, these are still really delicious!