The one thing I really miss is an oven. Roasted veggies, home-made pizza, casseroles, and baking. So tomorrow I'm heading over to another CBS property with a little different set-up than mine. They have a huge common kitchen with full fridge & freezer, oven, stove top, and
One of the challenges of cooking in Denmark is finding ingredients. Living in a city, we have many small "bodega"-type stores and each one seems to specialize in something. The one across the street has great fresh fruit provided the temps are above freezing, because its all displayed outside. One a little further down has cornered the market on chips, another one does organic foodstuffs. We also have supermarkets, which have a much wider selection, but on a Danish scale. "Wide selection" for Copenhagen means more than one brand. The biggest supermarket I visit regularly has two flavors of rice cakes - salted and unsalted. I can't for the life of me taste the difference.
I figured the makings for chocolate chip cookies shouldn't be all that hard to find and, for the most part, I was right. Two kilos of all-purpose flour (less than $2), tiny bag of white sugar ($2.50), 6 eggs ($4, no they weren't organic or free-range), 500g of dark brown sugar ($4.25), the world's smallest bottle of vanilla ($6), and handful of walnuts for half the dough ($5). In traditional Bajgier fashion, there will be two batches - one with nuts and one without.
Chocolate chips were a little harder. I couldn't find them in any of the three local chain supermarkets, but I did remember that Peter Beier Chocolatier several blocks down had chocolate slugs for baking. The Nestle Toll House recipe called for a 12 oz bag, which I had to convert to grams. I'll refrain from telling you how much I paid, but this was by far the most expensive ingredient. Could I have chopped up a standard chocolate bar? Yes. Would it have been cheaper? Heck yes. Would it have tasted as good or created the layers of chocolate strata the discs will? Definitely not. I find myself not splurging on much here in order to keep to a budget, but chocolate always seems to be an exception I'm willing to make.
While I was in the first supermarket, I realized I didn't have any measuring cups or spoons, and baking is pretty precise work. I figured I would pick some up at one of the many stores I would be stopping at. No deal. The closest I came was a single metal measuring cup with two lines on the outside - 100g and 200g. This completely confused me since a cup is a volumetric measure and grams are weights. 100g of sugar would probably fit in the cup, but 100g of flour probably wouldn't. I quickly messaged my neighbors to ask if they had something I could borrow and got lucky. The Indian woman next door who is slowly and patiently teaching me how to cook curries had a Pyrex measuring cup and metal spoons. Yay! Crisis averted.
Assembling the cookie dough, I can already tell that they'll taste a little differently than they would back home. The brown sugar is very dark and has a strong flavor. I probably should have replaced some of it with white, metal note for future batches. The vanilla confused me. There were several brands & quantities of vanilla beans available, but only one bottle of liquid extract - Vanilla in Bourbon. Its got little flecks of vanilla bean in it and smells great. I have no idea, though, if its the same strength as the stuff back home. And then there's the fact that I accidentally bought bakpulver instead of bicarbonat. A quick google search of how to replace baking soda with baking powder solved that one, but it will also effect the taste. They're cookies containing copious amounts of quality chocolate, though. How bad could they possibly be?
