maple bacon donuts

It's Saturday afternoon, and as typical I must wait until 4pm, so i can deliver our only wedding cake this weekend. Been a crazy, crazy day. Incredibly busy, I think we filled our macaron case three times today, and it's only 3pm. Markets didn't do so well today. It was bitter cold and windy. Funny enough both the Wilmette and the Evanston market are maybe five blocks from the lake. Close enough to catch breezes off the lake. The Green City Market is right on the lake in Lincoln Park. Hopefully by Wednesday things warm up. Poor Colleen came back to the bakery at noon today, her hands were beet red.

Last weekend in Minneapolis, over baker's, dinner conversation, a new donut idea came up, Maple, bacon, donuts. What? Jeremy from Seattle said they make 'em at Voodoo Donuts in Portland, Oregon. So, this week, we gave it a shot. We took yeasted long johns, iced them with maple donut icing. While the icing was still tacky, we laid a strip of crisp cooked bacon, on top. Kinda strange lookin' at first, but really delicious. We made a dozen on Wednesday, sold 'em all. The city of Evanston guys, that are here everyday,bought a couple. They came back on Thursday lookin' for more. We explained to 'em that we needed to pull the bacon out of our freezer a day ahead of time, so we didn't make any Thursday. We made another two dozen on Saturday morning, gone immediately. "Bout the middle of the week we're gonna start again. Oh, another thing I learned at Turtle Bread in Minneapolis, instead of "Store girl" or "Store personnel", we're going to start using "Retail kids". The retail kids asked once or twice, "How many bacon long johns did you make"?, Mark replied "Two dozen". All we heard was "Gotta double it next week". One trick we discovered, by dumb luck, we cook our bacon in the oven on a drip screen. So it's nice and dry of bacon drippings. Really adheres to the donut well. We've been roasting our bacon for our egg sandwiches on the weekend. As my dad would say "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while".

Day is done, it's time to load up this cake and get on the road. We're gonna start pretty early tonite, got alot of stuff for tomorrow. We'll be busy in the store, and a few country clubs we bake for, want mini breakfast pastry items for their Mother's Day brunch.

We have one night baker coming off vacation this Sunday, and another going to be off for a week. it's important that we get our guys vacation time off, finished before the market season really heats up.

Happy Mother's Day.