Bacon maple cake

For this month's Stamford Clandestine Cake Club, the theme was 'Around the world in 80 cakes'. I wanted to do an American cake, as we'd been to California on holiday this summer. I thought back to our trip and considered what were the most common flavours that we encountered... I'm ashamed to say that the most obvious ones were waffles with bacon and maple syrup.

I scoured the internet for a maple and bacon cake recipe, not quite sure how it would work out. My brother had a maple and bacon cheesecake while we were there, and it was surprisingly good.

This had to be the most hilarious cake I've made - it looked like a perfectly normal sandwich cake with lovely buttercream swirls..... and then slices of bacon laid on top.

Before the bacon

If you have a very sweet tooth (there's a lot of maple syrup in this) and also love crispy bacon, give this a try.

450g plain flour
4 tsps baking powder
1 tsp bicarb
2 pinches salt
200g marg
200g soft light brown sugar
4 eggs
150ml plain yogurt
150ml maple syrup

Cream together the butter and sugar until really light and fluffy.
Mix together the dry ingredients.
Add half the eggs, then a bit of flour, then the rest of the eggs, followed by the remainder of dry ingredients sieved.
Mix the yogurt and maple syrup together, then add to the mixture.
Pour into two sandwich tins (I had some left over as this made quite enough for a few cupcakes too).
Bake in the oven at 180C (170C fan) for about 30 minutes.

Room for cupcakes too

When cool, make buttercream with 125g butter, 300g icing sugar, and 100ml maple syrup. Smooth on to one layer, top with the other layer, and swirl more buttercream on top.
Fry at least six rashers of smokey streaky bacon (no oil), with a few drops of maple syrup right before the end. The bacon will caramelise a bit - it's not burnt!
When the bacon is cool, place on the top of the cake. I laid mine in strips, but it would probably be better chopped up first.

It went down well at cake club, although people were a bit unsure about its looks. If you like a bit of sweet and salty, this works really well.