Winner Announcement!!

Before I get started, I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who participating in the first installment of The Bacon Games, as well as Heather Lauer, who graciously agreed to take time out of her busy schedule to judge the entries. I have been thrilled with the response to this challenge and I am really looking forward to next month’s game!

I know you are all anxiously awaiting this announcement, so I’ll get right to the good stuff. I received an email from Heather last night with her choice for this month’s winner, as well as some details about how she came to her (very difficult) decision. I thought that everything Heather had to say was wonderful, so I’m going to share her entire email with you.

Hi there,

What an impressive group of entries! So much creativity! And I could honestly see myself trying every one of these recipes, I had to read through each of them several times before narrowing down my choices.

But for purposes of selecting the winner...

First of all, I wanted to choose a recipe that used bacon in a less obvious way. There are a lot of flavors that bacon combines with well, but bacon in dessert is always a challenge to pull off. You had a few entries in this area, but that’s where I decided to start in choosing the winner.

Despite bacon and dessert being a somewhat unusual combo, I’ve – not surprisingly – had bacon blessed desserts numerous times in my life. And there are some more common ways than others that people are using bacon in dessert, so for this contest I focused on picking a winner who created a bacon concoction that I hadn’t encountered before (which is a challenge).  It was also important to me that bacon was a significant ingredient in the recipe, and not just a secondary ingredient or after thought.

So I’ve chosen the Chocolate Bacon Truffles as the winner.  When done correctly, the combination of bacon and chocolate can be an incredibly complimentary pairing, and this application is unlike anything else I’ve encountered to date. I also liked the use of both bacon grease and bacon bits – these days, bacon grease is often overlooked as an ingredient in recipes that call for fat anyway. And the photo simply looks delicious.

Congrats to the winner!

Heather

So there you go, folks! This month’s winner is Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes!

Jana - Please email me your shipping information at bethanneleach@gmail.com so that we can get your prize to you!

For everyone else – next month’s roundup will be kicking off very soon with the revelation of December’s judge. Get your recipes in gear and pull out the bacon!