Sweet and salty is my thing. I’m that girl at the kitchen table dipping her breakfast sausage in pancake syrup. Snacking on strawberries and salted peanuts. Seriously..salt and sugar were made for each other. Why do you think pb&j sandwiches are so amazing?! And this Bacon Biscoff Toffee Cake was everything sweet and salty!

It’s only natural to conclude that bacon (salt) would go amazing with cake (sugar!) I’ve created a few bacon cakes before with delicious results but none have topped this cake. This.Cake.Was.Insane. And the secret behind this salty-sweet success was bacon fat. Yep…I said it…bacon fat.

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I’ve Been Dreaming of Bacon

I’ve contemplated the idea of using leftover bacon fat in a cake for a while and decided now was the time to jump. I mean…if you can’t have fun with cake, what’s the point?! So next time you cook up some bacon, don’t discard that bacon grease. Pour it into a cup and let it solidify. Leave in those teeny tiny little flecks of bacon too. They’re like caramelized little pieces of yum.

I wasn’t sure how much of the bacon fat to use. Too little and you lose the flavor. Too much of you end up with a greasy heavy cake. I decided to take my standard vanilla cake recipe and swap out my vegetable shortening for bacon fat 1:1 but reduced the salt seeing as how the bacon fat is pretty salty.

The Bacon Experiment Begins

The very first thing I noticed when using the bacon fat, was that it didn’t get quite as fluffy as the shortening does when I whip it up with the sugar. I’m assuming it has something to do with the melting point (if you’re a scientist please hit me up ?) but I charged on ahead with the recipe with fingers crossed.

When I had finished adding all the standard ingredients, plus some toffee bits, the batter was certainly thinner than what it usually is. But again…moving forward I baked it up and hot darn the layers baked a dream. Not to mention that my kitchen was filled with the heavenly scent of warm sweet bacon.

Sweet to Balance the Bacon

So we’ve got the salty component on lock. Now let’s bring in the sweet. Biscoff and toffee. There really is no substitution for homemade toffee sauce. And it’s way easy to make. I promise. Really, truly. First, all the toffee sauce ingredients go into a pot, bring it to a boil, and let it simmer for about 5 minutes or until it starts to thicken. Voila…toffee sauce!

I kept the Biscoff component really simple and used cookie crumbs right in the buttercream. Easy, effective, and stupidly scrumptious. Oh, and I added a few tablespoons of bacon fat because I couldn’t resist. Go ahead and drool now. And when you’re done drooling…make this cake. Because it’s everything a salty-sweet lover could possibly want!

Need more bacon-baked goods in your life? Try these Bacon Butterscotch Cookies. Or maybe you’re more into toffee? If so, check out this amazing Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake recipe.