Crowning the Queen of Delicious Animals

Ta da!

It's April.

The sun is shining.

The flowers are blooming.

And the Atlanta Fringe Festival is creeping up on us fast.

What's a girl to do but build a crown out of bacon and take promo pictures on her porch?

I had the notion pretty early on that I wanted to wear a bacon tiara. After all, it captures both the regal-ness of my title and the deliciousness of animals. Plus, it was an excuse to buy bacon as part of my advertising budget.

I'd seen people build things of bacon before - cups, bowls, Kevin Bacon, but the only example crown I could find involved transglutaminase, and came with the warning:
"You are going to be working with an enzyme that bonds protein. You are made of protein. Unless you want to glue your lungs together or glue your eyelids to your eyeballs, you absolutely must follow these safety rules."

Yep. No thanks.

Instead, I went for something a little lower tech and less likely to bond my organs to one another. Working off of Not Martha's Bacon Cup tutorial, I set about the  task of making a pointy bacon cup to fit on my head.

This is my concentrating face.

First I bent an old pie into approximately the shape of my head, just to have something to build the bacon around.

Then I covered it in foil and started building up a rough bacon crown held together with toothpicks, to keep it from shriveling apart as it baked.

Raw power!

Bacon Crown Alpha involved too many layers of bacony goodness and instead of crisping into head gear, it fell apart into a greasy mess and was promptly disassembled and made into BLTs.

Beta Crown involved fewer slices and more definitive crown points, and was overall far more successful. Unfortunately, because it was not a full circle of bacon, the tiara did not conform to the pie plate hat shape suggestion, and settled into something a little less curved.

Less is clearly more, or at least easier to wear

I ended up jury rigging a full headpiece out of a cardboard strip, hot glue, super glue, and staples, which was then counterbalanced by an eraser and a binder clip.

Fortunately most of the office supplies were able to migrate to the back of head and out of the shot.

Moments later this thing took a nose dive.

And so, all that was left to do was throw on some crushed velvet gloves and take pictures on the porch to amuse our neighbors. We very nearly had several bacon crown casualties, due largely to the fact that crispy, photogenic bacon is also brittle and delicate (who knew), and my inability to balance things on my head.

But eventually, I think we got it. Now time to make some sweet post cards to lure the Atlanta Fringe-going folk into my show!

(And eat the leftover, non-hot-glued bacon)