I’ve wanted to try bacon roses for several years now, so when I was invited to Troy’s birthday brunch, I thought it was the perfect opportunity! 3 lbs of bacon slices baked in the oven became 44 roses, one for each year plus 4 spares. The birthday boy loved them, and so did the other brunch guests, so only a handful of roses from the Birthday Bacon Bouquet were left by the end of the afternoon!
I had seen several instructions over the years for bacon roses, but I didn’t remember the details and thought I could just test my own ideas. I knew I wanted at least 40 roses since Troy was turning 40, so I bought 3 pounds of applewood-smoked bacon slices, about 14-16 slices per pound, enough for some experiments first. I figured letting bacon bake in a muffin tin 
would let petals open while keeping a curved shape, but my silicone pan was too tall and vertical, so it looked like my best choice was my nice and shallow old metal mini muffin tin. I tested a couple ideas first, but the cut petals concept on the right didn’t hold together, and rolling the bacon ended up baking too tightly no matter how I tried to fan out the scroll as petals. These initial experiments were thoroughly enjoyed as my snack. 
Next I thought I could try an angled scroll that could still sit in the muffin tins and lean at an angle. That ended up looking the best, so I baked a dozen at a time. Rolling from the inside out didn’t result in as good a shape as working from the outside in. You need to make sure the bacon touches or it will not anchor the shape as it bakes. Most of my slices had a meatier side and a fattier side, so I turned the meatier side to the bottom, started the bottom outside petal around the edge of the muffin tin well, then kept looping the bacon slice around and up until I tucked the end inside at the top. They leaned to the side on their own which helped them all fit in the tray, and the way these slices were cut, there was a natural curve at the edges of each slice. Turning the natural curve out like petals made it trickier to loop into the spiral, but it made a more graceful petal effect after baking.
This is the same pan of bacon roses after about 30 minutes of baking in a preheated 350F oven. You can see that the top edges are just getting crispy, and the shape is glued together enough to lift out of the tray, but the bottom is still underdone because it is swimming in its own fat. I lifted them out onto paper towels, poured all the hot bacon grease into a glass jar, and let the roses drain while I arranged the next dozen raw roses to be ready for baking. Yes, I was handling a lot of raw bacon, 
so make sure you do not mix raw and cooked areas and wash your hands between handling them! My sink water would finally be hot enough to wash my hands if I started running a small trickle when I started handing the raw bacon, then I could wash my hands immediately before putting the pan into the oven.
After all 44 roses were baked in their first round and all had drained on the paper towels, I added 12″ bamboo skewers so I could arrange them into a bouquet standing in a vase for an elegant serving presentation. Since the bottoms of the roses were still plenty soft, the skewers went in fairly easily, but I had to be careful not to crack any of the crispy cooked petal edges on top. I refrigerated the whole cookie sheet of prepared bacon roses overnight, then did the last baking for 30 minutes right before I left for the brunch. The pale bamboo looked more like skewers than stems, so an improvement would be to find green or darker brown skewers…but you can’t bake plastic floral stems! You could bake on toothpicks then replace the toothpicks with plastic floral stems, but you need to make the holes before the bacon is crispy or you’d just break your beautiful bacon roses.
While baking the roses on the skewers, they did flatten shape a little, so I doubt that skewering completely raw bacon slices into a spiral shape and baking flat would give as good a curved shape as baking vertically the first round. After all the bacon roses were crispy, I dabbed the extra grease off each one with paper towels, then set it into the vase, already prepared with teal glass marbles as weight and to help arrange the skewers into a nice bouquet. I arranged them evenly around the bottom edge first, then kept spiraling up into the center. Be careful when trying to rearrange them since the bacon wants to slip off the skewer very easily! I was able to fit 41 in the bountiful bacon bouquet, which was the birthday boy’s age plus one to grow on, then had 3 left that I carried into the party by hand. They were eagerly eaten before I could even set down my purse!
Brunch was delicious! Jerry had made a hearty egg strata, and there was a make your own pancake bar with nice hot level nonstick grill at the ready. Since the pancake batter was in a squeeze bottle, I tried making a matching rose-shaped pancake, like my previous attempts at pancake art. I didn’t wait long enough for the outlines to be much darker than the rest, but hopefully you can tell it’s supposed to be a rose. What a lovely Sunday!
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