Have you ever had a dish you absolutely love disappear from a restaurant’s menu? 
That’s a special kind of disappointment right there, especially when it involves bacon. And that’s how this recipe got its start.
Years ago, my husband and I would order gorgonzola cheese stuffed bacon wrapped dates every time we went to one of our favorite restaurants on the beach. They were coated in some kind of sweet carmelized crunchiness that was utterly divine, and the pungent gorgonzola cheese balanced the sweetness perfectly. 
Then they were gone from the menu, and I had mostly forgotten about them until we found stuffed bacon wrapped dates on another restaurant’s menu last week. We ordered them before we ordered drinks, and I’m not sure our server knew what to do with our excitement. We refrained from ordering a second batch of them, though I am still not sure how we mustered the willpower.
So, that night, I began my work on a stuffed date recipe. 
Both of the date appetizers we had in restaurants had been fully wrapped in bacon. While it tastes wonderful, the idea of wrapping a perfectly good piece of fruit in raw meat is a little bit “ewww” to me. Ok, a lot “ewww”. So the wrapping was out. I opted to put fully cooked bacon in the middle of the date – standing in the cheese – so you still get the bacon flavor and texture throughout.
And why is there no gorgonzola in these dates you ask? It is a seriously stinky cheese, which has never bothered me, but my poor husband isn’t a big fan. 
So, we have swapped it out for a milder blue cheese here.
Perhaps the biggest challenge was replicating the sweet coating that was on the outside of those magnificent stuffed dates. Rolling, dunking and coating the dates doesn’t work so well without them being wrapped in the aforementioned raw bacon. So, we have a small drizzle of maple syrup. 
I used pure maple syrup, and it adds just the right amount of sweetness without being overwhelming or labor intensive.
These bad boys are pretty easy to put together so long as you don’t eat all of the bacon before you can get it stuffed into the dates. Good luck with that!
Enjoy 🙂
Ingredients
- 9 dates
- 2 Tablespoons blue cheese
- 2 slices bacon, cooked, cooled and broken into 1" pieces
- 1/2 Tablespoon maple syrup
Instructions
- Remove a smaller side and an end to remove the pit from each date
- Stuff 1/2 tsp blue cheese into middle of each date
- Insert a 1" piece of crumbled bacon into the cheese, standing up like a fin
- Drizzle stuffed dates carefully with maple syrup
- Put in oven at 375 degrees for 10 minutes or until cheese melts and dates are fragrant.
- Note: I tried putting them in the toaster oven on "toast" and that got the job done but you have to watch to make sure the tops of your "fins" don't get too crispy using this method. Enjoy!
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