Like appletinis but wish they could be more bacony? Then perhaps you'd enjoy this bacon apple martini that is not only garnished with candied bacon, but features bacon-infused vodka as well.

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Before and After premium lager promises to give you a better outlook on life, and since it contains an amazing twelve percent alcohol  by volume (Budweiser averages five percent in comparison) it will either give you a strong set of beer goggles or it'll have you seeing stars!

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This is probably the world's tastiest QR code ever! To celebrate New Year, Chinese Internet company Tencent commissioned a giant cake shaped like a QR code and served it to 20,000 people:

The cake, which takes up a floor area of 36 square meters and weighs three tons, was produced by Tencent, an Internet and smartphone value-added service provider, and Ebeecake, a local bakery. It took ten hours to finish the QR code pattern on the cake's surface. By scanning the QR code pattern, smartphone users can download and install Tencent's news service client onto their gears.

Xinhuanet has the photo gallery: Link - via The Shanghaiist

Other than the dozens of toothpicks and string used to hold the thing into shape, this baconosaurus looks utterly delicious.

Link Via Obvious Winner

It might look like the real thing, but this Sorting Hat is really a cake filled with rice krispie treats and chocolate frosting deliciousness.

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How delicious is that cup of hot chocolate? The answer may lie in the color of the cup as much as the drink itself:

"The colour of the container where food and drink are served can enhance some attributes like taste and aroma," as explained by Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). Along with her colleague Charles Spence, from the University of Oxford (UK), the scientist has come to the conclusion in the case of drinking chocolate.

Both conducted an experiment in which 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four different types of plastic cup. They were the same size but of different colours: white, cream, red and orange with white on the inside.

Published in the Journal of Sensory Studies, the results reveal that the flavour of chocolate served in orange or cream coloured cups was better for the tasting volunteers.

Link (Image: Fisticup from the NeatoShop)

Have you ever looked at a piece of circuitry and said to yourself, 'Hey, I want to eat that'? Well, then, Dean Segovis has pioneered a way for you to do so safely. He's created a scale model (left) of a basic amplifier circuit (upper right) out of gingerbread, frosting and candy.

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Kinder Surprise Egg , like its name implies, is a chocolate snack with a little surprise hidden inside (the product is banned in the United States because of the small parts it contained may pose a choking hazard for little children).

But the one that Lori of Two Plus Us blog got from her boyfriend Matthew has a whole 'nother different kind of surprise:

Matthew had been up late “working” for many nights, which is the norm, but this time his real reason for burning the midnight oil was this incredible creation.

We used to buy Kinder Surprise Egg candies for each other all the time. If you aren’t familiar, it is a chocolate egg that contains a tiny, whimsical toy with assembly instructions inside. They are so much fun — maybe too much fun — sadly, the US banned them from import a few years ago.

Matthew painstakingly took apart the chocolate egg and replaced the toy inside with a small robot figure and illustrated instructions on how to assemble him into a tiny MatthewBot on bended knee. Also inside was my amazing ring! He then reassembled and rewrapped the egg to look virtually untouched.

Link - via Swiss-Miss

In honor of the release of the Play Station 3 bento box, Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima put together this amazing Metal Gear lunch to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the game.

Link Via That's Nerdalicious

Having a hard time waiting for Girl Scout Cookies to come back out again? Well, this guide to mixing them with brownies won't help, but it sure will be worth bookmarking when they go on sale again because these Thin Mint, Samoa and Tag-Along cookie brownies look like pure heaven.

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Somehow I have lived the past few years without having ever heard of Food Replicator, a Star Trek-themed food blog. Especially noteworthy is the author's attention to the delicacies of Ferenginar, such as jellied gree-worms. Yummy!

Above you can see a gingerbread version of the standard Starfleet communicators used during the original series. Here's how the author made it:

I cut out the pattern pieces on thick card paper and then used that to cut out the cookie pieces. I froze the dough before cooking as this helps it keep its shape.

I used royal icing (1 egg white, add icing sugar until the desired consistency is reached) for all decorations, as well as for gluing the pieces together.

Toothpicks and scrunched up pieces of plastic wrap are both very useful to use as prop-ups while waiting for the royal icing to dry when gluing the pieces together.

Link -via GeekDad

The New York Times sat down with the owners of three Manhattan Italian restaurants to discuss the correct way to eat pasta. They mostly agreed on a few rules: you don't put cheese on a seafood-based dish, you don't break pasta before cooking it, and you don't eat spaghetti with a spoon.

As to the use of a fork plus a spoon for eating pasta, all those at the table were adamant. Spoons are for children, amateurs and people with bad table manners in general.

Egi Maccioni recalled her childhood days of eating pasta. ''My grandparents spent hours teaching me how to eat pasta without using a spoon, how to twirl my fork so that not a strand of spaghetti would be hanging down as I lifted that fork to my mouth.''

Does anyone really ever eat spaghetti with a spoon? The article begins with 1975 advice from Elizabeth Post recommending it, but I'd never heard that before. How you do eat spaghetti? Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Flickr user Dèsirèe Tonus)

Before chocolate candy was developed, cocoa was almost always a drink. And far before chocolate milk became a kid's staple, cacao was a manly beverage, reserved for warriors.

Cacao was cultivated and consumed by the Olmecs and Mayans, but is most famously associated with the Aztec civilization. Montezuma the II, who kept a huge storehouse of cacao (supplied by conquered peoples from whom he demanded the beans as tribute) and drank 50 golden goblets of chocolate a day, decreed that only those men who went to war could imbibe cacao, even if they were his own sons. This limited chocolate consumption to royals and nobles who were willing to fight, merchants (their travels through hostile territory necessitated their taking up of arms), and warriors. For the latter, chocolate was a regular part of their military rations; ground cacao that had been pressed into wafers and could be mixed into water in the field were given to every solider on campaign. The drink provided long-lasting nourishment on the march; as one Spanish observer wrote, “This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatest sustenance of anything you could drink in the world, because he who drinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole day without eating anything else.”

All Aztecs thought of both blood and chocolate as sacred liquids, and cacao seeds were used in their religious ceremonies to symbolize the human heart – harkening to their famous ritual in which this still-beating organ was torn from a sacrificial victim’s chest. The connection between blood and chocolate was especially strong for warriors, and it was served at the solemn initiation ceremony of new Eagle and Jaguar knights, who had to undergo a rigorous penance process before joining the most elite orders of the Aztec army.

As chocolate was carried around the world, it was changed considerably, but still made into a manly beverage as nutritious sustenance for Arctic explorers and soldiers at war. The Art of Manliness has an extensive history of hot cocoa and its use, including tips for making yours better. Link

These days, chocolate-covered bacon has lost its novelty as bacon has already managed to infiltrate every other food by now, so why not chocolate? On the other hand, there are still plenty of bizarre things to cover in chocolate in this big wide world of ours…and here are a few of the strangest.

Onions

Most of us would never want to eat a raw onion in the first place, so why someone would think that dunking the onion in chocolate would change that fact is beyond me. The flavor seems to be exactly what you would expect too, one reviewer said that if you’re curious, just bite into a raw onion and then bite into a chocolate bar. Strangely, these seem to be a regular item in certain Philadelphia candy shops.

Image Via AndWat [Flickr]

Pickles

It sounds like a joke about pregnancy cravings, but chocolate-covered pickles are all too real. In fact, there are ample Instructables telling you how to make your own, including this one, which uses only two ingredients: pickles and Magic Shell.

Carrots

If you’re trying to get your kids to enjoy healthy snacks, getting them to eat chocolate-covered carrots will probably work –but at that point, the veggies aren’t really healthy anymore, so you might as well just give them chocolate-dipped gummy vitamins at that point.

Potato Eggs

While chocolate-covered eggs sound pretty bad, so do mashed potatoes loaded with powdered sugar and shaped like eggs like the ones in this Paula Deen recipe. According to the reader reviews though, the biggest problem with this recipe is that it has four times as much potato as it should include –leaving the mixture as a soupy disaster that can’t even be shaped into eggs.

Roses

Ah, Atari. You were my first gaming platform. How many hours did I waste playing Combat on you? Not enough, probably. The Pink Cake Box made this Atari 2600 cake for one man's fortieth birthday party. 

Link -via Between the Pages