Baking in Spain: easier said than done

There are many reasons why baking cookies in Spain is difficult.  First, and most importantly, I don’t have an oven.  Second, many of the ingredients just do not exist.  Third, measuring apparatuses are not easy to come by.  Not surprising, as there is not even a word in Spanish for “baking”.

Despite all these setbacks, Rachel and I were determined to make some good old American chocolate chip cookies.  A few weeks ago, we spotted the holy grail of rare American goods that are unattainable in Spain: chocolate chips.  Knowing we had to use them for something, we bought them immediately, despite the expensive price tag.  We then decided we had to make cookies.  Hitting up two of our local grocery stores, we found almost every ingredient we needed.  The brown sugar was more like sugar in the raw for your coffee instead of packed baking sugar, and we accidentally bought powdered sugar instead of plain white.  We had to substitute baking powder for baking soda, and the questionable vanilla extract only came in one size: enormous.  Our tub of margarine had to substitute for sticks of butter and we got off-brand Spanish M&Ms to make up for our small amount of chocolate chips.  Who said baking has to be an exact science?

Getting our ingredients home, we faced challenge number two: no measuring cups.  Our recipe called for cups and teaspoons, whereas our products were measured in grams.  Realizing there was no conversion from a measurement of volume to a measurement of weight, and without a scale to measure the grams, we were up the creek without a paddle.  This is where some great guesstimation took place.  We converted cups to liters, and measured out approximately how much a cup would be by filling a one liter water bottle and pouring it into water glasses.  Turns out, if my rough calculations were correct, one water glass equaled about one cup.  So we began to mix our ingredients in small Tupperware containers, unable to produce mixing bowls and wooden spoons.  The batter looked and tasted a little different than normal, but cookie dough is cookie dough, and we proceeded to eat many bites.

Luckily, our friend Julia has an oven, so we were all set to bring over the dough to make our cookies.  We had no cookie sheets, so we fashioned one out of tin foil.  This seemed like a good idea at the time, but pulling out a flimsy sheet of foil from the oven is easier said than done.  Some cookies fell, some smeared, and all got mashed up into some sort of half-cooked, half-gooey nightmare.  We dug in with our fingers, and the hot dough with the melted chocolate tasted amazing, despite the less than attractive appearance.  Given the circumstances, they turned out as well as we could have hoped.  But from now on, I think I’m a believer that cooking is an art… baking is a science.