Bourbon Bacon Bark

Hygge is a Danish word. There is no real English translation. Approximations apparently include “togetherness”, “well-being” and something like “coziness” if coziness were a word we applied not to physical things, but mental ones.

It is in other words, more or less impossible to pin down in English, but here’s what’s easy to understand — the feeling the word is meant to describe. Abandon words and picture your ideal day spent with your favorite people, eating the best food you’ve ever had and so on. Notice the feeling that produces in you. That, as I understand it, is more or less Hygge.

It’s a hard thing to come by most of the time in our culture. Most people work all day and most people do not have Hygge-inducing jobs. It also seem to be pretty near impossible to manufacture Hygge out of thin air.

The only way I know how to manufacture something like Hygge out of thin air is to take a few of my favorite people and make something wonderful like Bourbon Bacon Bark.

I am a pretty good cook, but a terrible baker. The rest of the year I avoid baking. The precision necessary for good results just doesn’t appeal to me most of the time. But this time of year is all about sugar so I give it shot anyway. Besides, my wife makes a fantastic fudge which can pick up the slack when my efforts fall short.

I stick with simpler things I’m not likely to screw up, like sugar cookies. Or my more recent addition, Bourbon Bacon Bark.

It started last year when I ran across this amazing recipe over at NWEdible. As good as that recipe is I’m completely unable to follow a recipe without injecting my own ideas in there somewhere. About half a second after I saw the title of that recipe I knew it was missing just one small, alliterative ingredient — bacon.

Bourbon Bacon Bark. The words just feel right — there’s a rhythm there that almost guarantees the results will be great. This is what happens when writers cook.

If you’d like to make my version, follow NWEdible’s recipe, but when you’re melting the butter, toss in a tablespoon or two of bacon fat.

Then, when you stir in the pecans at the end, go ahead and add in a couple nice thick slices of bacon cooked up extra crispy and crumbled. Without the chocolate it isn’t all that pretty.

The point of course is get everyone involved. I finished off dozens of crème brûlées a night in my time at the 5 & 10 dessert station, so I know very well how badly melted sugar burns. Suffice to say kids would not enjoy it, so I kept the girls back a bit, which earned me this look.

Chocolate on the other hand is pretty harmless. And the girls are big on stirring things. Even things that don’t need to be stirred.

Until of course the chocolate is gone. You’re making more right? What?

Plenty of Bourbon Bacon Bark left though.