Notes:
– Grinding the side meat in a blender was a huge pain in the neck; best to plan ahead and ask the butcher to grind it.
– This recipe made two 8″x8″ cakes.
– For one of them we substituted pecans for walnuts and used one cup of maple sugar and one cup of brown sugar rather than two cups of brown sugar. I liked that one better.
– ‘Enough flour to make stiff’ turned out to be about two cups total (one per cake)
– I panicked and insisted the cakes be pulled after an hour. There’s no telling what another 30 minutes would’ve done; someone with candy-making instincts (vs. cake-baking instincts) might have better intuition about baking time and temp.
– Pretty good! Taste and texture closely resemble pecan pie filling. It doesn’t taste especially of meat (certainly no more than lard-based pie crust.) Might be worth trying with smoked bacon to emphasize the peculiar origins.