On Wednesday, I determined to have my first German baking adventure this week. Stovetop cooking doesn't change much as you cross the water: pasta still goes in the water when it's boiling, vegetables sauteed in olive oil still taste good, and you just cut the chicken open to see if it's cooked through. Baking is another story. And technically, I ought to begin telling this one at the point when my host mom left for Italy at 4am on Thursday morning:
When I woke up a few hours later and entered the kitchen to eat my bowl of muesli before heading out the door, I found my host dad looking dolefully at an empty sugar bowl. While I cut my banana, he looked everywhere for the sugar bag. No luck. I ventured to help and turned up a dish of something that looked like sugar. Well, three teaspoonfuls of salt into his coffee later, we discovered there was also no more milk. That's when I decided I needed to move beyond my usual trips to the fruit and vegetable stand near the train station and find an actual grocery store.
After class, I found a grocery store midway down the S-1 line, where I bought sugar, salt, eggs, milk, bread, almonds, and raisins, but baking soda had me stumped. I knew that the German word for baking powder was Backpulver, but no dictionary nor German I encountered that day knew what the word for baking soda was. I decided to hope for a recipe for zucchini bread ( a pretty safe place to start my first time baking in a foreign kitchen- I made it a hundred times last year as a form of thesis procrastination) that didn't require baking soda, and hauled my ingredients back home. No easy feat, actually when you have a heavy backpack, a large bag of groceries that includes eggs, and there's a ten minute walk to get to your front door!
In the kitchen, everything went really well- till I couldn't figure out how to pre-heat the oven. Then, I wasn't encouraged by the bewildered expression on Nico's face when I asked him how to work the oven and explained that I was making zucchini bread. My activities must have caught his interest, however, because he popped into the kitchen at least 6 times throughout the evening. The first four were on the pretense of getting a drink, when he must have gotten tired of drinking water, he finally just came in and asked directly if the bread was ready yet.
In the process of putting the groceries away, I found the sugar we'd looked for that morning, but realized that the cinnamon was missing. (Cinnamon is nearly always a key ingredient when I bake, so this was a serious blow.) I then proceeded to take my American recipe, double it, convert everything to the metric system, change the oven temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius, use nutmeg instead of cinnamon, hope no one would notice the lack of baking soda (at least the recipe included baking powder and I put plenty of that in), and pray. Perhaps the largest risk I took was that I baked such a large quantity because I wanted to bring it to Biblestudy the following night.
Thankfully, everything turned out more or less alright- everyone at church seemed to like whatever it was (it turned out to be a zucchini-carrot-apple-raisin-nutmeg bread in the end) and Nico devoured the slices I left out for him the next morning. I'll never be able to repeat the recipe again, of that I am sure. Perhaps it would be easier to use German cookbooks next time.
On another note, I came home from Bible study tonight to find no less than 9 cartons of milk in the fridge. Apparently, after his horrible breakfast on Thursday morning, my host dad is determined to never run out of milk again.
