Baked Bacon Cinnamon Rolls

My good buddy Dave isn't a big dessert lover. Last year, for his birthday I took on a challenge to make him a cake that he would love so I made meat cupcakes with mashed potato icing. They were memorable but not a total success...I think they would've been rockstar tasty if they were hot but unfortunately they were eaten hours later and cold. Cold mashed potatoes= not the best.

This year, I wanted to try again to combine sweet and meat and with some online inspiration I decided to combine bacon and cinnamon buns! Just going to say, these turned out wayyyy more delicious than meatcakes.

The ingredients were pretty basic and I cut corners a bit by not making my own dough. This cinnamon roll dough actually came in little bun clumps so I had to roll them out into thin strips. Get the oven heated at 400.

Then I fried up a few strips of bacon on my George Foreman grill. Try to take the bacon off the grill or pan before it gets crispy. Fry up an extra piece of bacon and grill that one crispy and chop it up into small bits.

Next step is to take a strip of bacon, place it on the dough strip, roll it up and then secure with a tooth-pick.

When you've finished rolling your batch, place in a round metal cake pan and bake for 12-15 minutes. Let the buns cool for a few minutes, put on a small dollop of the icing that comes with the dough, and then top with chopped crispy bacon.

My apartment was filled with an intoxicating sugary, cinnamony, bacony aroma. The taste was both sweet and salty and the texture combination with the soft, freshly baked dough and crisp, crunchy bacon was a nice contrast. These had cooled down before we ate them but honestly, they would've been mind-blowingly good to eat fresh from the oven.