baked jalapeno poppers;

From the lady that made jalapeno popper stuffed bread before she made traditional jalapeno poppers, I give you baked jalapeno poppers!  As I’ve said, you can thank my lack of spice tolerance for this delay.  Somehow a dip that’s made much more of cream cheese and cheese and other goodies seemed less intense than jumping in full to jalapeno poppers.  Plus the last batch I had were made by a lady who thought we all loved spice, and were a looooot too intense for me.  Delicious, but mouth-on-fire delicious, and hence I had somewhat avoided these.  Which is silly really, because when you’re making them yourself, you can adjust everything to your own particular taste.

So when a coworker brought in some fresh jalapenos, I knew that I had an appetizer for the night all set up.  They were delicious!  I even purposefully mixed in some of the seeds, and additionally there were those pesky few that clung to the jalapeno halves that I didn’t bother to remove.  My tastebuds are growing up.  And I’m sure for half of you, you’re scoffing at me, but I’m proud of my taste buds~!  Besides, I definitely can’t resist fresh produce when all the hard work is done for me and basically hand-delivered!

I ended up using vegetable cream cheese for these, nothing fancy, just the spreadable kind.  Because I only took a few, I didn’t want to open a whole brick of cream cheese, and I had some veggie cream cheese already open.  Besides, you can’t really taste the veggies and they make you feel better even while not removing any calories.  Mixed together with some sharp white cheddar, a few jalapeno seeds, and some seasonings, these are quite good!  Anything wrapped in bacon is good, to be fair.

My one complaint on these is that the bacon didn’t get quite as crispy as I would have liked.  As T pointed out, I like my bacon crispy, but not everyone does, so keep that in mind.  (Floppy bacon is wrong bacon.  But you can still have this recipe.)  I was incredibly hungry, so I didn’t really try anything to get that extra crunch–otherwise I probably would have tried to broil off the top to get my crispy bacon.  I was hungry enough that I shoved one in my face immediately after removing from the oven and definitely hurt my mouth.  I would highly suggest letting them cool for 5-10 minutes before serving, especially to children or Katie-like-hungry-people because while the actually popper doesn’t seem too hot, the cream cheese mixture is like molten lava.

They did erupt a little in the oven as you can see from my photos, but that’s because the jalapenos were cute and bite-sized, but I had to guess on the bacon lengths, and clearly could have used more bacon.  Also remember that bacon shrinks when it cooks, so maybe even a double wrapping isn’t a bad thing!  I would love to make some of these in advance for a party, and then re-heat just before the party.  I think since the bacon contains everything in a nice little package that it would work out well, assuming, of course, that they were wrapped better than these little suckers here.  I also probably overstuffed the filling a little as well, since that expands, and I wasn’t going to do anything with a spoonful of jalapeno cream cheese mixture, I just made it fit into the jalapeno halves.  Try this out, and let me know if you make yours look prettier!  I promise they’re tasty either way!

Related posts:

jalapeno popper stuffed bread; stuffed jalapeno popper rolls; loaded baked potato rounds; five layer dip; jalapeno cheddar stuffed burgers;