bacon and egg breakfast cups

I had seen pictures of these bacon and egg "muffins" floating around the internet for a few months now and have always wanted to try them. So a few weekends ago, I decided to pull up a recipe and give them a go. They were ok, but there were a few things I didn't like, so I tweaked the recipe and tried again. 

My second attempt was pretty awesome. I'm a big fan of breakfast foods - whether eaten at actual breakfast time or some other time of the day (yep, "breakfast for dinner" is a regular thing in our kitchen!) so here's my take on bacon and egg breakfast cups!


bacon and egg breakfast cups 
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ingredients:

6 strips of bacon
6 eggs
6 round slices of panetonne (or other bread of choice) - make sure the circles are the right size to fit into the bottom of each muffin cup
salt and pepper to taste

directions:

Preheat oven to 350 F.

In a frying pan, fry the bacon until it's just slightly less done than you like. Don't cook them too much, as they will cook some more in the oven. Remove bacon from the pan and lay them out on a paper tower-lined plate to de-grease and cool down enough that you can handle them without burning your fingers!

Very lightly spray a standard muffin tray with non-stick spray (or lightly grease them with oil or butter)

Line the side of each muffin cup with the cooked bacon. If the bacon strip is too long, cut off the extra piece and place in on the bottom of the muffin cup. (I made sure to do this because I liked the idea of having a complete bacon "cup", not just the sides).

Place a piece of the circle panetonne slice (or whatever bread you're using) into the bottom of each bacon cup.

Crack one egg into each cup. (I cracked the eggs into a bowl first and then carefully poured the egg into each hole because the eggs I used were a little larger than usual and were actually spilling over brim of the muffin up. You want to fill each cup close to the top, but not all the way)

Bake for 20 minutes, or until the eggs are done to your particular preference (we love our yolks runny!)

Remove from oven and place the muffin tray on a cooling rack for 5 minutes to cool down a bit.

Quickly run a butter knife around the edge of each cup and use the knife to help lift the bacon and egg breakfast cups out of the pan.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste.

yields: 6 breakfast cups

I love munching on these - they're a fun twist on our usual bacon and eggs doesn't take too long to make.

I've been asked what happened during my first trial. After reading through several recipes on the internet, the one problem I had with most of the ones I browsed were that they instructed you to cook the bacon right in the muffin tray either for a few minutes before adding the egg, or just with the egg and no pre-cooking. 

I had originally done as instructed and lined the muffin tray with the raw bacon and baked it in the oven for 10 minutes before pulling it out to add the egg. What I saw was pretty disgusting. Yes, this method saves time (and the washing of a frying pan) but the amount of grease that the bacon produced in the muffin tray was gross. Each cup had almost 1/3 of grease sitting in it. I had to physically transfer the bacon into a fresh muffin tray and then add the eggs. So, it didn't really save me any clean-up time since I ended up with two muffin trays to wash. Pre-frying the bacon in a separate pan is a little more time-consuming, but it helps avoid the pools of grease in each cup!