whipping it up 2009

I decided to participate in the Whip It Up 2009 challenge, and here it is the first week and I already feel behind. I'm blaming most of this on the fact that I spent the first half of this week in Utah and so only had a few days to come up with a recipe, make it, and then post. Lucky for you I saved all of those tasks until this morning. As the theme for this week is holiday food, and as today is a holiday, I figured that anything I made today would qualify as holiday food. And because I was making dessert for a holiday BBQ this evening, I figured adding one more thing was going to be a breeze. I could not have been more incorrect.

First, the mini pies with star tops that I was planning for dessert tonight didn't turn out at all. It could have been because I ignored the advice to use store-bought pie crust and pie filling (hello! My recipe for both pie crust and cherry filling are awesome, so why would I compromise and use something from the store?) and then didn't have the correct size cookie cutter for the cute star pie top. Tragedy. After the first batch went woefully awry, I knew I had to come up with a back-up dessert. One batch of lemon blueberry cheesecake and one batch of cherry cupcakes later, I was all baked out. Actually, somewhere in the middle of these two things I became baked out. And I still didn't have a new-to-me recipe for the challenge!

It was right about lunch time when I decided that I would have to make something that would qualify for the challenge AND lunch, and the Internet didn't disappoint with Brown Sugar Bacon Waffles from Joy the Baker. Why, hello there, holiday brunch!

And here, friends, is where I become one of those annoying Allrecipes.com reviewers who are all, "I substituted orange juice for the milk, cinnamon for the nutmeg, and doubled the eggs, and this recipe was horrible!" My whole goal was to avoid using the oven as it was already busy cooking the cheesecake and cupcakes. So I improvised. I pulled out my Makin Bacon and attempted to get the caramelized brown sugar bacon (clearly the star of this recipe and clearly only attained by baking the bacon in the oven) in the microwave. Fail. Does not work. Evidence below.
I went ahead and put that bacon in the waffle batter anyway, because, well, I had to do SOMETHING. And they turned out okay. For some reason my waffles are much thinner than Joy's, and the bacon really has more of a charred flavor than a caramel flavor, but they were good.Seriously, though. Waffles? With brown sugar? And bacon inside? Served with strawberries? These couldn't go too far wrong. The recipe was very easy to follow (and this would have turned out much more scrumptious if I had followed it exactly), it was pretty quick to make this (which is ALWAYS a good thing, especially for a holiday brunch), and the resulting waffles were yummy to eat. I would make this again.