Chili, chocolate bacon cupcakes

Having looked on the internet, turns out I am not *quite* as unique as I thought, and other people have done the bacon cupcake thing before. But this 'recipe' came from my own breadpan and was born of a niggling desire to run with the whole bacon dipped in chocolate fad.

Somehow making the cake mix the British way of creaming butter and sugar didn't really mesh in my mind with the idea of bacon, so I added the fat the American way of adding half a cup of oil along with the wet ingredients.

I need to get a petit fours cake tin as these all turned out funny shapes.

So, I've made a basic cake mix using cocoa for the chocolate taste and oil for the fat. To marry the sweet with the savoury I added a cup of cold strong coffee (my thinking being you add either coffee or chocolate to chili mole to make it a more complex flavour). To my mind it bridged the gap between the two flavours.

Here's the bacon being stirred in. The picture on the right is actually of a batch that didn't get used. On the first attempt I put the bacon in the food processor so that it was bacon crumbs. They tasted okay at the time (Saturday afternoon) but by Sunday morning, the flavours seemed to have leached so they tasted almost like normal cakes. Shame really, there were lots of them!

The milk of the ganache was infused with chilies before adding to the grated dark chocolate. I wanted to use the Lindt chili chocolate as that's good, but couldn't find any. 

And finally, cooked up some cayenne-dusted bacon, chopped pistachios and roasted them with a bit of lime and sugar and attached the nuts to the bacon with a dab of ganache to make a pretty little garnish