Summertime is a great time, if you live in a market like New Orleans where tourism pressures relax, to fool around and have some fun in a kitchen.  You have time to think about projects, like putting up seasonal ingredients that are too abundant for you to possibly sell in sporadic summer business.   Cooks also have time to be inspired by stuff they normally don't pay attention to, stuff they take for granted.  You can court serendipity when you're not so slammed that you're in such a big hurry to handle your everyday gigantic prep list.

Serendipity found me today at The Delachaise.  I actually got ahead on my creme brulees by a good bit (we have Sour Cherry Brulees with Godiva Liquer Cocoa Sugar now; next it'll be back to the Rose Petal Brulee (made with Lebanese rose petal jam) and Burnt Pomegranate Sugar  -- which I prepped today.  So we were ahead of the game, and Miles and I were talking about developing a little dessert special to finish off his Dreamsicle Ice Cream.  Miles had made the ice cream -- really it's a blood orange semifreddo made with Italian meringue, whipped cream and the juice, zest, and some sugar -- for a cool tart he made with a blood orange compote with strawberries baked into that and a mint streusel on top of that.  The semifreddo was scooped on all that.  Good dessert, and we had a bit of the semifreddo to use.

At first, I thought of making a French-style ice cream sandwich utilizing tuile batter -- because I had some extra egg whites left from assembling creme brulee -- which only uses egg yolks.  Too technically difficult: fragile cookie tuiles, couldn't pipe the semifreddo when frozen, and couldn't risk thawing it much as it will deflate and melt quickly.   So I was looking at a bowl of fresh, warm bacon fat from a new sheetpan of Nueske's applewood smoked bacon, when a lttle idea popped up in my brain.  Make a profiterole batter using all bacon fat in place of butter.  The butter is melted anyway in making pate a choux batter, so there's no problem subbing rendered bacon fat.  Throw in some chopped dates because bacon-wrapped stuffed dates --devils on horseback -- and all the variations on the bacon and date theme kick butt.  Put in the orange semifreddo for a classic French take, and don't worry about a sauce -- Miles had a jug of his family's Grade A maple syrup from the coldest, highest maple farm in Vermont.  Maple syrup and bacon -- another good combo....

To finish it off, we decided to take a thumbnail's worth of cooked bacon, and grate it, like lemon zest, over the dessert plate ,  thus making bacon powder.  We added a thumbnail's worth of bacon powder to each plate to gild our little lily.  It worked out great!  It was so fun, yet everything on the plate had prior relationship in taste experience.  The bacon was very present, but not at all overpowering.  Everybody who tried it, enjoyed it, and I like the fact that it tastes like dessert straight up -- not a maligned savory dessert.

I keep this blg largely to document what's happenin' in my kitchen.  This little bacon-date profiterole qualifies as an extremely happy accident.  I am tempted to keep running it in some guise or another for a while longer.  Poppy and I both think a dulce de leche ice cream would be even better than the Dreamsicle, though we wish for a salty caramel ice cream even more.  I could even see butter pecan type of ice cream matched to the bacon-date profiterole.  

Bacon is a natural dessert ingredient, even though it seems transgressive, or worse, just wacky in a dessert context.  It's sweet and caramelized already.  If you can rein in it's smokiness -- the cured pork flavor is very compatible with all sorts of dessert recipes.  Remember, leaf lard from pigs make the best pie crusts, too.  Today's motto is, "Bacon -- it's what's for dessert!"