You know the feeling, dessert lovers. It’s mid-afternoon, or after dinner, or the middle of the night, and your sweet tooth is throbbing, begging you to indulge as your mind wanders into that delicious dreamland of rich chocolate, creamy peanut butter and … crunchy bacon? Well lucky for you, pastry chef Josh Short’s mind is just as twisted as yours. He designed this month’s special cupcake at Buzz Bakery in Alexandria, a chocolate cake topped with peanut butter mousse sprinkled with crisped pieces of thick-cut applewood smoked bacon. Short, the bakery’s executive pastry chef, thought it up mostly out of boredom. “I have the attention span of a three year old,” he said. “I get bored easily.”
But … bacon? Well, why not? “It’s one of my favorite things ever. And it’s good with everything,” Chef Short told DCist as we chatted with him at the bakery and café on Slaters Lane this week. “We already have bacon in the morning with pancakes and syrup and all this sweet stuff. Why not put it together with peanut butter and chocolate?” The cupcake has been well received at the bakery, where patrons have come to expect variety in the monthly special. “There comes the day you put on your red shirt, and you feel a little daring,” he said, describing the shop’s eclectic clientele—in baking terms—as “marbled.”
Sadly, the whole point of a rotating special cupcake is its short life, meaning you have exactly 10 days to haul it over to Buzz to try one of these masterpieces. OR … you can do as I did and accept that you can’t live without them, and figure out how to make them yourself. Luckily, DCist saved you the trouble of having to beg Chef Short for his peanut butter bacon mousse topping recipe, and the batch I made as a test for this column came out strikingly close to the original. (Upon re-examining the pictures, however, it appears that I sort of skimped on the bacon… what was I thinking??) And don’t worry, next month’s special cupcake at Buzz won’t disappoint; Short let slip last week that a s’mores cupcake is currently under development.
