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I make! Bacon egg cupcakes edition

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So…bacon and egg cupcakes.  They are a thing.

I saw these awhile ago and I’ve really wanted to try making them.  I didn’t though because it involves a muffin tin and I only have muffin tins that make a dozen muffins at a time.  I didn’t want to eat a dozen of these.  Sure, I didn’t have to fill the entire muffin tin, but you don’t really get a good feel for a recipe if you only make like…one cupcake…thing.

I’ve seen several iterations of these recipes and most of them say to either cook the bacon completely or at least halfway before using them to line the muffin tin.  If you’re making 12 of them, cooking bacon in a fry pan is really annoying.  It takes forever because you can’t cook more than a few pieces at a time.  And I needed 18 slices of bacon (12 whole slices to line each well of the tin and then two quarters of a slice on the bottom of each well).  Unless you have like a 24″ fry pan.  If you have a 24″ fry pan, how big is your burner?

What I ended up doing was to stick the bacon in the oven as it was preheating.  Just spread them out on some sheet pans and stick them in the oven is still cold.  When the oven is finished preheating (about 15min for my oven) the bacon slices are half cooked.  Then you can use them to line your muffin tin. And this helps cut down on the grease.  And if you wanted to cook a great deal of bacon all the way through, just leave them in the oven for longer.  About a total of 20-25 min, depending on how crisp you like your bacon.

Before you assemble, REMEMBER TO SPRAY YOUR MUFFIN TIN WITH COOKING SPRAY.  Or at least prep it in some way.  I didn’t because I had forgotten and didn’t remember until I had already started the assembly process.  You are dealing with eggs.  They love to stick to everything as they are cooking.  The residual bacon grease will not be enough to keep the eggs from sticking to your pan.  It actually wasn’t that bad, but it still took some soaking and scrubbing to get it off.  All of which could have been avoided if I had just sprayed the wells beforehand.  So remember to prep the pans.

After you have your pan entirely lined with bacon, you can plop in the eggs.  I did a whole egg in each well with some salt and pepper sprinkled on top.  I’ve seen people do some kind of scramble with chopped onions or bell peppers and herbs too.  I might try that next time.

I baked mine at 400degF for about 15min and the yolks had just turned solid.  Adjust your time accordingly if you like softer or firmer yolks, I guess.  The edges of the bacon were crisp and pretty good.  The rest of it stayed a bit softer than I like.  I think I might cook the bacon for a bit longer next time I try making this.  The bacon would unlikely ever be entirely crisp since it’s stuck in a well and has egg mashing up against it, but I think I could get it a little less floppy.  The crisp edges were good though.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I removed them from the pan via chopsticks.

Anyway, there you have it.  Bacon egg cupcakes.

Pet peeve: Unreasonable drivers

I spend a fair amount of time on the road so I see a good amount of stupid driving and stupid drivers (as well as perfectly good drivers, but we aren’t talking about them in this post).  Some are just reckless, some are distracted, some are completely clueless, and some…are just plain unreasonable.  And it’s that last category of drivers that really irritate me.  The other types of drivers I can stand…from afar.  I may find them briefly annoying and/or dangerous, but once I’m far enough away from them, they don’t continue to bother me.  But those unreasonable drivers…

So, what do I mean about unreasonable driving?  Well, it’s not really a particular style of driving.  It’s not necessarily aggressive driving, although sometimes that’s part of it.  It’s that these people are probably unreasonable in their day to day lives as well and it happens to be that they are driving near me and thus I perceive them to be unreasonable drivers.

So…what do I mean about unreasonable people?  You know the type.  Sometimes you see the woman arguing heatedly with a shop clerk about something inconsequential and has to have her way.  Or it’s the guy who is really demanding and condescending and rude to the wait staff for no reason other than he perceives that it makes him look powerful.  Or the client the demands to include things outside the agreed scope of the project and refuses to give you more time or money to do it.  You know, unreasonable people.

So, I assume when these people go driving, they keep their unreasonable ways.  For example, there was a woman driving a luxury SUV behind me when we were very stuck in traffic.  So stuck that we were probably moving only 10 ft every 30 min or so.    You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.  It was really bad traffic.  We were also in the left lane so there was no place to go.  And what did she do that was so unreasonable?  She would honk.  Any time I let more than 3 ft of space get between the next car and me.  Three.  Feet.  And when I would look back in my mirror at her, she’d be gesticulating and pounding on her steering wheel.  I’m sorry, but in the grand scheme of things, being 2 ft closer to your destination when you’re stuck in stuck in such bad traffic doesn’t make much of a difference.  If we were in the right lane and I only needed to move a few feet so that she could get around me into the right turn lane, I would think she was a jerk but I’d do it, because I know how frustrating it is when you only need a few more inches of space to get to a lane you’d like to be in.  But we weren’t in that situation.  And she was being completely unreasonable.

Another example?  How about the guy in a subcompact who would flash his high beams at me and put on his blinkers to try and get me to move over into the next lane so he could pass me?  Now then, the US has standards on the use of the passing lane.  You generally pass on the left lane and slower traffic should keep to the right.  And this is in relation to the speed of the traffic around you, not the posted speed limits.   So, if the traffic around me was moving faster than I was driving, then definitely I should have moved over to the right and let the guy pass.  BUT.  I was traveling with traffic.  And I was traveling faster than traffic in the lane to the right of me (we were in the leftmost lane).  And I was holding distance between the car in front of me who was traveling at about the same speed I was.  And this guy would not have any of it.  He kept flashing his high beams at me.  And I finally did after I passed one particularly slow moving truck.  And he raced forward past me by about 1 ft when he had to slow down again.  Why?  BECAUSE TRAFFIC WAS MOVING AT THE SPEED I HAD BEEN DRIVING.

What I found even more irritating is that after he passed me, he proceeded to repeat his whole performance to the car in front of him.  He may have been doing that the entire trip, slowly bullying other cars out of his way.  I think he managed to bully that other driver too, and then what?  Same thing.  He got may be a foot in front of the other car and had to slow down again BECAUSE TRAFFIC WAS MOVING AT THE SPEED I HAD BEEN DRIVING.  If he kept at it, he would have had to do that for a line of like 5 cars because we were all traveling at the speed of traffic around us.  I do not understand why he was being so unreasonable.  And at the very least, he could have just started weaving like any other aggressive and impatient driver would have.

THE. ANNOYED.