Wednesday, April 04, 2007

(Sesame St. Voiceover) Cookies! Um num num num num....

Tonight I had this great idea to give everyone a taste of home and comfort: chocolate chip cookies! Sounds easy enough, right? Riiiiight.

First off, you have to buy flour, baking powder, soda and brown sugar at the import store - they just don't bake here. Could be because nobody has an oven, I don't know. But I luckily had all the ingredients I needed on hand, even real butter (from Fraaaance). I even had my friend the Monster Mixer on the counter. Sadly, we couldn't find a way to make the mixer work because it's a 3-prong 110 Watt machine. Our converter to 220 watts only works with two-prong plugs. So, Tim got a nice workout mixing the ingredients for me.

About halfway through (too late to turn back) I realized the movers had never packed a single cookie sheet, even though I had clearly marked them "TO CHINA." Nor did they pack any of my cake pans, to go with the 16 cake mixes they DID pack, but that's another story for another time. So, I took a sheet of foil, greased it up and stuck it to the broiler pan. I also used a 9 x 13 pan for the rest of the cookies. I'm starting to believe that the bulk of creativity comes from desperation.

We used up our chocolate chip stash, and I have yet to see chocolate chips anywhere, even at the import stores. Very sad, indeed. Please don't send us any because it's really hot here and we'd end up with a giant chocolate lump. Eeuuu.

My oven, which I am incredibly lucky to have here in China, is a strange bird. Most ovens here are those teeny little half-size European jobs. Mine is full-size, but there is no window, so you have to open the oven to see what's going on, letting out most of the heat. In this case, however, that's a good thing, because regardless of what the temperature gauge says, this baby just keeps getting hotter and hotter and hotter. Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise that the cake pans never arrived. Perhaps they were afraid.

Anywho, we finally got them mixed and baked and put them to cool (for about 3 seconds). We all had a little bedtime snack (because it was bedtime by the time I finished). And you know, they did taste like home and they were some of the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever had.

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