Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today was exciting! We planted plants and made chocolate chip cookies. The plants are exciting mostly because now we have some green in our apartment to break up the white, tan,...and more white. Making chocolate chip cookies sounds easy enough until you try to gather all the necessary ingredients in Amsterdam.

We think people here just go to the bakeries that are on every corner to buy their sweets. Granted, this is much easier but not as fun as making cookies at home! Erin has known for two weeks now that she needed to be looking for items like baking soda, flour, and sugar. Two weeks, five bike rides, and four stores later - Success! Almost.

Granulated sugar comes in larger granules here than in the U.S. Baking soda can be found at an American food store: a whopping €7 for a tiny box. Chocolate chips are (thus far) nonexistent. John spent a little time this evening making his own chocolate chips from a bar of chocolate.

We have only one measuring device in the apartment: a 16 oz. plastic cup that goes with the hand blender. We think it's for making smoothies. It's in metric units only, and obviously it is suppossed to measure wet ingredients. We just used our handy laminated metric conversion chart and ignored the fact that flour and sugar are not wet ingredients. Measurements like teaspooons and tablespoons are educated guesses around here. Since it was difficult to measure "a stick" from a block of butter, the dough ended up a bit dry and Erin eventually added a little milk to make it the right consistency.

The final results: Excellent! Now that the last batch is baking, we can definitely conclude that these are good cookies! Wish you were here to have some with us. Oh well, we'll just have to finish them off ourselves. :-)