Baking Adventures

I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies last week for some of my friends, teachers, and colleagues. I do this nearly every holiday season and it has become a tradition. However, I have always been home for the holidays and even when I have been abroad at other times of the year, I have never had the opportunity to do much baking.

So this was quite a learning experience. Among the items not stocked in Austrian supermarkets include brown sugar and chocolate chips. Hmmmm. Both ingredients are essential to the cookies. It's astounding that in a country so well-known for its chocolate and for its baked goods, you still cannot buy a product as basic as chocolate chips. Luckily, Austrian supermarkets do stock bars of baking chocolate, so I bought one of these and hacked it into chocolate chunks.



Then I just had to find a solution for the brown sugar. Well, brown sugar is essentially white sugar with molasses, right? I couldn't find moasses--though I was told you can find it in specialty gourmet stores--but I did find some dark honey. So, in the cookie recipe, I used less white sugar and added a bit of honey and it actually worked quite well. The taste of honey wasn't overwhelming and the cookies might have turned out a tad moister than usual.

Once I made all of the ingredient substitutions, I had to fiddle a bit with the oven. I have a gas oven, which means that I need to light it manually every time I want to use it. That's not too difficult, now that I know how to do it. What makes things more interesting is that most Austrian ovens do not have temperatures labeled on their heating dials. They just have numbered "settings".

I do have a description of what each setting is supposed to be for, but the descriptions are much to vague to be useful. So, I baked the cookies between the settings 4 and 5 -- that is, between the settings for "strudel dough" and "Braten" (roasted meat). In a few hours, I had a few dozen cookies.

Apparently, the cookies were well-liked, which is somewhat amazing, considering all the estimation and wild guessing involved in the baking. I brought a tin to my university's engineering department and it was empty by midday. I also brought a plate of cookies to my landlady and she brought me some of hers in return.



I must say, hers are much fancier and much more "Austrian", of course. The crescent-shaped ones, covered in powdered sugar, are the Vanillekipferl for which Vienna is famous.

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An addendum to the baking story: now that people in the engineering department know I can bake (or at least fake my way through recipes ;-), I have since received requests for American brownies. Let me assure you that Austria does not sell brownie mix, so these brownies will be made completely from scratch. Stay tuned for the exciting details!