The problem with baking in Germany

Two of my biggest challenges in Germany are food shopping and baking. Now that I think about it, the two are related. Over the last two years, I have gotten by with meal cooking, but baking has been more of a problem.

Take, for instance, baking that perennial American favorite, chocolate chip cookies. My first month here, I decided to bake some and went to the store, shopping list translated (something I would forget to do periodically and it was a problem -- particularly in the spice aisle). I thought I was all prepared. As has happened often since we moved here, it ended up being more difficult than I anticipated. It was a little while before I was able to bake some cookies. And there was a learning curve (i.e. burned cookies) working with my metric convection oven.

I found the following items with no problem: flour, sugar, salt, butter, vanilla and eggs. When I did some research on-line (there are several threads about baking chocolate chip cookies in Europe on ex-pat websites), there were long discussions about which type of flour was best, whether or not you need to add extra salt to the batter (most butter here is unsalted) and if the vanilla here (bourbon vanilla) is OK to use (it is).

But the other ingredients were a bit of a challenge: You can find chocolate chips, but they are sold in tiny packages and to buy the equivalent of 2 cups, you'd be paying around $12.00. I found that chopping up a block of semi-sweet chocolate worked OK and some kind people have brought or sent me chocolate chips from the U.S. or from the commissary. Baking soda is another thing you have to have sent to you or brought to you from the commissary (along with Cream of Tartar). But the biggest challenge at first was the brown sugar. I could find no brown sugar in any stores. They have brown granulated sugar, but no moist brown sugar.

I did some research and found out that it's actually easy to make your own brown sugar. Just mix granulated sugar with molasses. OK, so I just had to find molasses. Scoured several stores but came up empty-handed.

I did some more research and found out that you can only find molasses here in health food stores and what they carry is a thick type called blackstrap. Further research showed that I would need to add some honey to the mixture to make an American-type of brown sugar. I finally gathered the molasses, sugar and honey, but was so frustrated and intimidated by then, that I gave up for a while.

And then my big discovery. I had read on-line where some Chinese grocery stores carry brown sugar. There was a little Asian grocery store right at the big Super-Walmart-ish type of store I go to once a week and I made a point of checking it out.

And there on a shelf was some dark brown sugar. What a find! As I made my way through the little store, I found other things I had not yet located elsewhere -- red pepper flakes, fresh cilantro and green chilies. I was a happy lady.

I was able to make chocolate cookies that turned out fairly well. Onto the next challenge.

David's birthday was two weeks ago and it passed by quietly with no celebration. We had had visitors the week before and sick children for almost a whole week straight the following week. I was determined to make his favorite lemon cheesecake today. Last year when I made it, a friend had brought the ingredients for me from the U.S. This year, I'd be on my own.

I went shopping for the ingredients and found butter, cream cheese, vanilla, and sugar just fine.

Here's what was tricky: Evaporated milk (I got a less-fat condensed milk), lemon jello (didn't realize when I bought it and as I was preparing the cheesecake that the jello here is unsweetened and I should have added less gelatin and more sugar), graham crackers (no graham crackers here, but found an animal cracker type of cookie that worked OK).

Oh, and there's the extra challenge of following an American recipe here where you need to convert everything to metric or vice versa. I use my food scale constantly.

In the end, the kids liked the cheesecake, but David and I were less impressed. The consistency wasn't as fluffy as it should have been and it had virtually no flavor, even though I added some lemon juice for good measure. David was a good sport, but didn't declare it "A triumph, my dear, a triumph!" (Quote from the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol) as he has been known to do in the past.