Surprisingly Good Soft Bacon Fat & Maple Chocolate Chip Cookies

These bacon maple chocolate chip cookies with walnuts have an amazing smell when baking. The old fashioned style maple bacon cookies puff up instead of spreading in the oven to make the most delicious bacony maple flavored cookies.

This maple bacon chocolate chip cookie recipe was inspired from my daughters excitement over learning she could save bacon fat and cook with it. So no it’s not a super healthy cookie but man oh man is it ever delish!

With a slightly savory flavor these maply soft cookies aren’t overly sweet. In fact they have less sweetness than your average chocolate chip cookie. The cookies don’t spread much and so you can space them closer together on the baking sheet while baking.

Bacon fat is a versatile old time ingredient when money was tight many households would keep a can on hand to store this fat for later use. Particularly suited to deep frying the thickened grease fully replaces butter in this unique cookie recipe.

How to Make These Sinful Cookies!

Starting like most other cookie recipes you mix the sugar, eggs, and fat together. You might be noticing that we are old school measurers. Meaning we use our Fire King liquid measuring cups to measure all ingredients.

 

 

 

When we measure our vanilla, baking soda and salt we use our regular spoons from the dinnerware. What?! That’s right I grew up with little extras in the kitchen like fancy measuring spoons. So we learned the ‘eyeball’ method.

What is this ‘eyeball’ method? The small dinnerware spoon is your teaspoon and the larger soup spoon is the tablespoon. If you imagine the bowl of these as being four parts you can easily envision them to measure your fractioned ingredients.

 

 

 

The big takeaway is that you don’t ever want to have a rounded teaspoon as that means you’re getting too much. Make sure it’s flat. You can often use the edge of the baking powder or soda container to make sure things are level.

If you’re not feeling confident with your eyeball method you can use the regular measuring spoons. Remember baking is all about fractions and making sure your amounts are right. That means be consistent in the tools and measurements you make.

You’re going to see now that the cookie dough is mixing up rather dry. That’s when we add in the maple syrup!

 

 

I tell you this cookie dough smells so reminiscent of the maple sugar bush or a stack of pancakes with a side of bacon that you will want to stick your nose in the bowl and breath deep!

We are adding semi-sweet chocolate chips and walnut pieces to the finished cookie dough. Holy heck these seem super sinful! Packed full of sugar, syrup, bacon fat, chocolate chips, and walnuts you may want to rethink that diet you started.

Roll your cookie dough into 1.5″ balls and put on the cookie sheet. We ran out of parchment paper so ignore the seasoned baking pan here. I am a firm believer in a good pan can last a lifetime! Since this was a completely new recipe my daughter invented we weren’t sure how much space we would need.

 

 

 

It turned out we didn’t need to space them too much as these bake up like pillowy old fashioned chocolate chip cookies. Pay close attention always when baking cookies to the edges for signs of browning. These cookies can be overbaked a bit but not much or they will get rather hard.

The cookies once baked cool fairly quickly and are super soft pillows of sweet and savory. This cookie recipe is such a unique treat to try at least once! If you do let us know what you think of this truly Canadian chocolate chip cookie recipe.

So what’s your favorite use for bacon fat? Let us know in the comments below.

Your Questions Answered:

Do I have to refrigerate the bacon fat for storage?

While it’s true that people kept this in the cupboard in olden times we don’t recommend you do now. Put the fat in a mason jar with a lid and it takes up little fridge space.

Do I have to strain the bacon bits from the bacon fat before use?

No, absolutely not! In fact we debated adding bacon bits to the recipe. It will just add a bit more bacon flavor and not effect the recipe overall.

How long do these cookies keep?

These cookies keep fairly well for up to five days in a covered container.

Can I make this recipe with butter instead of the bacon fat?

Yes you can if you like. It will just be a maple walnut chocolate chip cookie then. Still tasty though!