Another Cooking Story
Once our lasagna pan was emptied of lasagna, I decided it was time to make cookies. A few things stood more or less in my way, among them the following:
1. My lack of a bowl bigger than our two awesome pasta bowls that say, "PASTA" on them. They hold approximately one serving of pasta, and are in other words much too small to hold a batch of cookie dough.
2. The availability of measuring devices in my kitchen, which is: one measuring cup that tells you how many grams of rice/flour/sugar, but does not in fact measure volume.
3. My inability to remember the number of ounces in a cup, and the fact that the ounce labels on my Nalgene bottle had rubbed off anyway.
4. The fact that everything in Germany is measured in grams anyway, rather than cups and teaspoons.
5. But that didn't actually matter, since all I could remember of the recipe was "3/4 cup brown sugar" and "either two or three eggs" and "a few cups of flour?"
6. If there even were chocolate chips available in German supermarkets (there aren't!), they wouldn't have the Nestle Tollhouse cookie recipe on them.
7. German butter comes in 500 gram amounts, not in sticks. How many grams is a stick of butter?
8. Anyway, I don't have any way to weigh things.
9. Germans don't use vannila extract; they use "Vanilla Sugar." Do I therefore use less normal sugar? How much normal sugar am I even supposed to use?
10. Germans don't really use baking soda, so it's hard to find. Also, baking powder comes in little packets. Do cookies even use baking soda though?
11. My oven goes from 1-8. I don't even know what that means.
12. I'll have to halve the recipe in order to make it fit in my "mixing bowl," but I don't actually remember the recipe, so at this point that was moot.
So I made cookies, using chopped up bittersweet chocolate, eyeballing the amount of butter, 1 egg, about 3/4 of 1 tea mug of sugar, variously full teaspoons of baking soda and powder and salt, and some amount of flour that made it resemble the right consistency. I put the oven on "4" (a result of some pretty complicated Applied Math involving ratios, assumptions, and Farenheit/Celcius conversions) and hoped for the best.
The result? According to Jeremy, Cookies Take One were: "delightful, impertinent." Jeremy sometimes lets his sense of creativity (in regards to words) take over, however. I think the cookies were "good, though not like normal cookies." Cookies Take Two were pretty great though, and although Cookies Take Three ended up kind of flattened out, Cookies Take Four [Now With Cinnamon!] were the best cookies ever made, ever.
It should be noted that I didn't make all these cookies on the same day. That would have been crazy. I guess I should also note that in between Take One and the rest of the batches, my dad sent me the actual recipe, but at that point it would have been harder to figure out the measurements, so I stuck with my mug/eyeball methods.
Mmmm.
1. My lack of a bowl bigger than our two awesome pasta bowls that say, "PASTA" on them. They hold approximately one serving of pasta, and are in other words much too small to hold a batch of cookie dough.
2. The availability of measuring devices in my kitchen, which is: one measuring cup that tells you how many grams of rice/flour/sugar, but does not in fact measure volume.
3. My inability to remember the number of ounces in a cup, and the fact that the ounce labels on my Nalgene bottle had rubbed off anyway.
4. The fact that everything in Germany is measured in grams anyway, rather than cups and teaspoons.
5. But that didn't actually matter, since all I could remember of the recipe was "3/4 cup brown sugar" and "either two or three eggs" and "a few cups of flour?"
6. If there even were chocolate chips available in German supermarkets (there aren't!), they wouldn't have the Nestle Tollhouse cookie recipe on them.
7. German butter comes in 500 gram amounts, not in sticks. How many grams is a stick of butter?
8. Anyway, I don't have any way to weigh things.
9. Germans don't use vannila extract; they use "Vanilla Sugar." Do I therefore use less normal sugar? How much normal sugar am I even supposed to use?
10. Germans don't really use baking soda, so it's hard to find. Also, baking powder comes in little packets. Do cookies even use baking soda though?
11. My oven goes from 1-8. I don't even know what that means.
12. I'll have to halve the recipe in order to make it fit in my "mixing bowl," but I don't actually remember the recipe, so at this point that was moot.
So I made cookies, using chopped up bittersweet chocolate, eyeballing the amount of butter, 1 egg, about 3/4 of 1 tea mug of sugar, variously full teaspoons of baking soda and powder and salt, and some amount of flour that made it resemble the right consistency. I put the oven on "4" (a result of some pretty complicated Applied Math involving ratios, assumptions, and Farenheit/Celcius conversions) and hoped for the best.
The result? According to Jeremy, Cookies Take One were: "delightful, impertinent." Jeremy sometimes lets his sense of creativity (in regards to words) take over, however. I think the cookies were "good, though not like normal cookies." Cookies Take Two were pretty great though, and although Cookies Take Three ended up kind of flattened out, Cookies Take Four [Now With Cinnamon!] were the best cookies ever made, ever.
It should be noted that I didn't make all these cookies on the same day. That would have been crazy. I guess I should also note that in between Take One and the rest of the batches, my dad sent me the actual recipe, but at that point it would have been harder to figure out the measurements, so I stuck with my mug/eyeball methods.
Mmmm.
posted by Katherine at 10:44 AM
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