Attention bacon lovers: If you don’t own a muffin pan already, you’ll probably want to pick one up real soon. You can turn bacon into ingenious edible bowls by baking bacon in a miniature or full-size muffin pan. Think bacon egg breakfast cups, breadless BLTs, or bite-sized bacon appetisers.
The possibilities are almost endless for these crunchy bowls.
How to make bacon cups
Caterer Peter Callahan (via Delish), has a particularly intriguing take on this snack variety by baking bacon in a mini muffin pan topped with baked beans in his book Bite By Bite. Bon Appetit has shared the full recipe for these mini bacon cups, if you’d like to recreate it at home.
Martha Stewart also has a take on bacon cups. She mixes them with eggs and bread to create a sweet little bite-sized bacon and egg toast bowl.
The next variation we want to explore is from Kirbie’s Cravings. The bacon’s not really fashioned into a bowl in this case, but rather a ring holding an egg.
I have made these using Kirbie’s recipe, and they were the cutest and tastiest breakfast cups. Essentially, you start with either pre-cooked or halfway-cooked bacon moulded into a circle in the muffin pan and crack the egg into it. Check the site for the recipe and other variations, including adding avocado or putting a circle of toast at the bottom of the regular-size muffin pan. Yum!
Megan at Not Martha showcases yet another bacon cup, this time made by weaving the bacon strips onto the back of a muffin pan (turn the muffin pan over, like you do to make cookie bowls or taco bowls). Fill these little cups up with lettuce and tomato, and you’ve got a breadless BLT. Pretty delicious, no?
If you’ve tried any of these bacon cup recipes or have an idea of your own, let us know in the comments below – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Oh, and if you’re looking for a plant-based alternative to bacon, check out our write-ups on banana peel and carrot bacon here, and here.
This article has been updated since its original publish date.
