Bacon-wrapped cream cheese

I'm super excited to share this experiment and would've posted sooner if I didn't opt to go on an alcohol binge ... but that's for a different story. I first saw a photo of this on an account I follow on Instagram. It didn't have a recipe or a link to the recipe so I pretty much had to wing it. Well, it's bacon and cream cheese and I'm a firm believer you can't go wrong when those two are the main ingredients. Before I forget, I got it off Queen Bacon's ig account that you can find here.

INGREDIENTS: 

• 1k Bacon (woohoo!)
• 5 packs of 180g-227g cream cheese (I wouldn't recommend cream cheese spread)
• 2 salad tomatoes, chopped (preferably fresh but if you use canned make sure you drain it thoroughly so your stuffing doesn't become ... watery)
• Jalapeno, chopped (I'd have loved to use fresh but couldn't find any at the moment *sniffs; drain this well too)

Ingredients

DIRECTIONS:

• Put cream cheese, jalapeno and tomato in a bowl and mix it all together. Depending on the cream cheese you use, prepare your arms for some serious mixing because some can be thick and hard to blend by hand. The amount of tomato and jalapeno depends on you, really. I only used about 1/4 of a 473ml bottle of jalapeno.

Your stuffing should look like this. Mix WELL.

• Line your pan with baking paper and then line it with bacon ... lots and lots of bacon. Make sure they overlap and hang over the edges because you have to fold it later. 

Aluminum  tray lined with BACON!!

• Place the stuffing you made on the pan and fold up the sides to cover the stuffing.

Hello, gorgeous!

Tuck it all in

• Cover the top with more bacon.

More bacon!

• Put it in the oven (350C) and then cook for 45mins up to 2 hours ... or until your bacon looks like how you want it to. 

In to the oven

Now, in a perfect world you only have to put it in a pan and leave it BUT this is bacon, you might open your oven and find this masterpiece submerged in bacon grease. This is why it's important to use grade-a bacon, the thick ones. Not the super processed type that disintegrates into nothingness when  cooked.

This is how it looked like after I took it out of the oven the second time. I like my bacon crispy so I had to put it back a third time :)

What I did was poke some holes on the aluminum tray to drain some of the grease after cooking for 40mins. Careful not to make it too big because the cheese will most likely leak out too. I placed it back in the oven and then let it cook some more. After another 30mins I took it out, let it cool down a little bit, and transferred it into a CorningWare. This is where the baking sheets come in handy. Once it cooled down a bit for the cream cheese to become somewhat firm you can transfer the whole thing without breaking the arrangement by just holding the end of the baking sheets. Put it back in the oven again and cook some more.

 

I wasn't able to take a photo before I cut it up in parts lol