It's A Good Thing

Martha would approve?

Last night the American and I decided to embark on a what can only be described as an epic quest to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Those familiar with the glories of French dessert are aware that they have an abundance of croissants, pastries, chocolates, gateaux and a million other little delights my mind dared not conceive before I got over here but sometimes you just need a real cookie. As such, we decided to take it upon ourselves to christen my new oven with our own fresh batch.

Similar to last week's Mexican fiesta meal that fell a little short, the cookies wanted to be good but something went awry somewhere along the way. A few possible reasons why...

First off, we had to find a recipe using only baking powder since baking soda is pretty much non-existent here. Ditto for chocolate chips, which run at about 10 bucks for a postage stamp-sized bag... that is, if you can hold out long enough on the scavenger hunt to even find them at all. Rather than face the prospect of selling my firstborn child for a decent amount, we decided to buy cheap chocolate bars smash them up instead. This might have been more trouble than it was worth but we really really wanted cookies. Oh and we also had no brown sugar.

We pressed on. Only to come to the realization, once we were already home of course, that we had the wrong kind(s) of flour. Apparently we needed Type 65 and had only types 55 and 45... Say what? Mom? So we decided to buck up and use what we had. Well actually, we had no choice since the grocery store does in fact, posess food but isn't actually trying to sell anything by being open for a grand total of about 5 hours a day. Maybe 6 if it's Thursday which is made up for not being open at all Sunday or heck Monday either. Throw your hands up for a 4 day weekend. Before you think I'm complaining, we knew all this before, but were just pissed that somehow didn't take precautions and buy every kind of flour available. Anyway, long story short - we later found out the 65 flour was pretty key when the cookies came out the consistency of dog biscuit.

These problems were child's play compared to the fact that we don't have measuring tools of any kind. We tried to buy some by miraculously making it to the store during operational hours but alas, sold out. Sweet. So we improvised by conducting a complex experiment using a bag of rice and a mug. Ah science. We poured out the last 150g of rice into a mug and estimated that the mug was roughly double that, so we had one 250g container. Which makes what in cups? Your guess is as good as mine... Your guess is probably better actually, based on the amount of sugar we thought was supposedly correct... Dang it, where are my grade 7 fraction skills when I need them!?

Last but not least, my oven thermometer is only in celsius. Luckily my Canadian heritage saves the day again as I'm familiar with this unit for reasonable outdoor temperatures, usually on the far negative end of the scale in the Motherland. Unluckily, it's fahrenheit all the way for baking. The American was obviously useless in this domain as well. So we figured 190 was a nice strong number and hoped for the best.

8-10 minutes later, choirs of angels sang as we opened the oven door.
15-2o minutes later we contemplated rolling myself down the stairs to throw up the dozen & a half cookies just eaten.

Despite all the stumbling blocks, our attempt was a reasonable success. The cookies were flat, really crunchy about 40 seconds after cooling and way too sweet. But pretty good. Tonight we're going for creme brulee.

My oven doubles as a dollhouse

Missing the "dough" in cookie dough.

The carnage from the rice/mug measuring experiment

Objects in photo are not as delicious as they appear...

16 crunchy wonders of creation

The aftermath

My stomach says no