A Baking Adventure, part 1

The stories that come out of the tea kitchens here after baking catastrophes are priceless.

"All the ingredients are in German!"

"There are no chocolate chips!"

"There's no such thing as baking soda here!"

"This backpulver is fake!"

"I think I used vinegar!"

"I did use vinegar!"

"What is this metric rubbish!"

The trick, my friends, if you do not care to seek assistance from one of the mom's who lives across the street, is to ask the nice sort-of-english-speaking German lady you find in the baking aisle. Every baking aisle has one if you look hard enough or...or happen to be at the right place at the right time. I call it Divine Providence meets Spar.

Also, you must not be afraid to take a large hard object, possibly even your foot, to brown sugar cubes.

After that, you're on your own to perfect american recipes with German ingredients and your culinary genius. If you don't have a culinary genius, you can just learn German recipes, or live vicariously through me. I must just warn you, however, that it will be an adventure in the most literal way. As my good friend Scott Adams would say, creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

I guess now we come to my first attempt at making edible food in a tea kitchen at the Kartause. If ever I thought baking was fun, I had no idea what I had in store for me here. I mean, metric conversions? Powdered vanilla? Brown sugar cubes? Gosh, my joy is just overflowing. Praise be to God for another Sunday and the opportunity to be able to mess around with foreign ingredients in the wee hours of the morning.

This morning's project brought back memories of a girl I babysat a few summers ago who told me quite bluntly: if you add enough sugar, kids will eat anything. [To any parent that might read this, I promise that most of the time I avoided that advice.] When I realized that something was amiss with the flour was using (it could not have been my measuring skills, after all), I modified her theory slightly with the hopes that if I add enough chocolate, my roommate will eat anything. I eagerly await being able to test this hypothesis.

As far as my taste buds are concerned, though, I am happy to report that my first baking experiment with metrics, awkward flour, and sugar cubes was/ is delicious. It's funny, sometimes you have to redefine success in order to attain it. Regardless, they are cookies, and they are chocolate, and while they would taste completely different if I had used the correct ingredients, I have a feeling that my experimentation in a foreign tea kitchen has just begun.

Happy Sunday! And yes! That is a real live Alp in the background.