Bacon Roses

In addition to the whoopie pies I made for my Valentine, I couldn’t resist making him something out of bacon.  About a week ago, he sent me an e-mail indicating I needed to look no further for a Valentine’s Day gift idea. The e-mail contained the bacon roses that have been circulating the internet as of late. At first, I thought the idea was pretty funny.  Then I thought, that’s a genius idea. So I set out to find a way to do this.

Most of the directions I found called for drilling holes in muffin pans. While I’m not that partial to my muffin pans, I can’t see drilling holes in things that are perfectly serviceable.  The disposable aluminum muffin pans proved impossible to find in my area for some reason (was everyone using them to make bacon roses?), so I decided to rig up something of my own and hope for the best.  It worked- the bacon was the right balance between crispy and chewy, and the house didn’t burn down.  It did get a little (a very little) smoky in the oven, so I do recommend opening some windows and turning on a vent fan just in case.

Bacon Roses

Ingredients and supplies:

Bacon, a strip for each rose you want to make, I used 12.

Artificial roses

toothpicks

Directions:

Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Take one strip of bacon at a time, and with the fattier edge toward you, roll the bacon up from widest end to thinnest, into a rose shape.

Put two toothpicks through the bottom of each rose in a cross shape.

Set each bacon rose into a cavity of a muffin pan. The toothpicks should keep the bottom of the rose from touching the bottom of the muffin pan. You want the grease to drain without the bacon sitting in it.

Put the muffin pans in the oven and bake the bacon for 30 to 40 minutes, until crispy on the outside.

While the bacon is baking, prepare the stems.  Remove the buds from the stems of the artificial roses. Pull the plastic center of each bud out of the petals.

Put the plastic “pin” into the piece of plastic that used to hold the bud. Push this down onto the stem, about an inch from the end of the stem.

Remove the toothpicks from the bacon.

Push one bacon rose onto each stem.

To display or gift, the “roses” can be put into a vase, or wrapped.  I wrapped these in wax paper and secured with ribbon.

Source: adapted from Instructables