Adventures in Baking
We were spending the weekend in Markersdorf with Mike's parents, so I thought I should bring some cookies. Even though they probably wouldn't like them, it would be a nice gesture! This time I planned to bake both sugar and chocolate chip cookies. The main problem I had in finding ingredients this time was that there was only one type of chocolate chip (no semi-sweet, etc), and the brown sugar was granulated, not packed. Oh well, I figured, sugar is sugar, and chocolate chips are chocolate chips, right?
Well the recipes I found online at AllRecipes.com called for a LOT of butter and sugar. Which I guess is what makes them sooo good.
I made the dough for the chocolate chip cookies and put some in the oven. I knew the dough looked funny, but I was hoping for the best. When they came out they were flat and greasy. Luckily, my roommate Carl is some sort of Chef-Boy-Wonder and he informed me that they needed more flour, and the day was saved. Mike also saved the day by eating the flat greasy ones.
I used cute little star cookie cutters for the sugar cookies, but when they came out of the oven they were blobs, instead of cute little stars.
I thoroughly enjoyed my cookies. His parents each tried one, and strangely enough, didn't ever have more. Mike and I ended up eating them all. But they did make comments about how buttery they were. Yumm. But if I had to describe German sweets I would probably start by not using the word sweet. All of the Christmas stuff is gingerbread which is not sweet at all and is rather hard. I ate some bread at their house that had brown swirls which I thought were cinnamon or chocolate, but they turned out to be poppy seeds. Yuck. So I guess I am more used to my cookies, with a whole cube of butter and lots of sugar. Mmm lecker (German for delicious or tasty). And also sehr gesund (very healthy)!
My little Penny-cat is doing well. She still has schleim (as the Germans like to call it) in her chest, but I hope eventually she will sneeze it all out, and hopefully not all of it in my face as she likes to do. She is 12 weeks old now, and we are starting to give her more freedom to roam around the apartment, since she seems to know how to find her way back to her box now. She is very sweet and needs constant affection. She gets very jealous of the computer and other things that take the attention away from her. And she loves to talk.
