My next quest after successfully finding the Christmas tree was to find the ingredients to make my Christmas cookies. I significantly pared down the list to 4 different kinds of cookies and trooped off to the store. Oh my God. It took me 4 different stores over 2 days to get all the ingredients, and I had to pay $8 USD for a can of Cream of Tartar! And that was just the beginning of my adventure. Baking cookies in China takes more than the ingredients for the cookies, it also takes a laptop computer, an oven thermometer, and a brain!
The first cookies I set out to make were peanut butter with Hershey kisses. Gigi & Olivia helped out by taking the wrappers off the kisses for me, although at one point Gigi was also helping by biting the pointy top off the kiss to "make it look prettier mama." Anyway, early on in the recipe I realized that I needed to convert the 1/2 cup of butter the recipe calls for to ounces, because the sticks of butter here are imported from New Zealand or France and they have ounce markings on the side. So the laptop comes into the kitchen and I google "convert cups to ounces" and wait, and wait, and wait. And finally realize that our wireless doesn't work in the kitchen. Out to the family room, google again, and find out how many ounces I need. Great, cookies dough gets made and then I wait another 25 minutes for the oven to get pre-heated. All in all, it takes my very small oven (half the size of ones in America) 40 minutes to pre-heat to 350 degrees F. Go figure. Anyway, cookies come out and are flatter than usual but taste great so the baking continues.
Next are the sugar cookies, and these are fun because the girls are going to ice and decorate them. Nothing about these cookies is very complex, except in China where the only type of lemon extract I could find came in these little vials instead of bottles. It's a German brand, and each little vial was .5 ounce of extract. (These little vials look like the sample perfumes you get in department stores.) When I bought them I didn't think a thing of it. But when I popped the plastic lid off and tried to pour it into the teaspoon, the liquid would not come out. Finally I realized that there was a bubble in there and it was moving to the top and creating a seal every time I tried to pour. OK, so I get out a knife to try to pop the bubble, too fat, won't fit in there. I scrounge up a paper clip and unbend it. I stick it in and it goes right through the bubble but the seal doesn't break. Is this a bad joke? I ram the paper clip up and down and still the bubble remains. What is the trick to getting this lemon extract out of here? Then I decide it must be this particular vial, so I open another one. Same story, can't get the stupid liquid to come out. I am so frustrated that I shake it up and down and of course drops of lemon extract come out. So I shake these little vials with all my might and manage to get a teaspoon worth of extract by shaking individual drops out of 3 separate vials. I still don't know how the hell you're supposed to get liquid to pour from those vials but I got my teaspoon! Once the lemon extract is in, the rest of the cookie dough is made without incident.
But every batch of these sugar cookies comes out different, the first ones are burnt after 6 minutes in the oven, the next ones are crispy on the edges and gooey in the middle after 8 minutes. I know the temperature is steady because I have the oven thermometer in there, so what is going on? I have no idea, but I HAVE to get at least 24 good cookies because I am taking them to Olivia's class the next day for a decorating project. I end up making 2 batches (probably 72 cookies in all) and hand pick out the best looking 24, even though they are slightly darker than they should be. I taste them and they seem alright, if a little lemony.
The next evening I make the snickerdoodles, which are the reason I bought the $8 cream of tarter. I make about 4 dozen of these and set them to cool. The next morning Joe says to me politely, "did you taste those snickerdoodles?" Uh oh. I taste them and they are awful, and rock hard. Totally inedible and have to go in the trash, but even after re-reading the recipe to see if I did anything wrong, I don't know why.
Later the same week, I am making a cheesecake and I get out a stick of butter. One thing I have failed to mention about buying imported food in China is that it all has a big sticker on it with all the Chinese import information. And they always put the sticker over the instructions on the box, or the nutritional information. Seriously, it never fails. Never once have I seen one of these import stickers covering up the bottom of the box, and never once has the sticker come off the box or wrapper without ripping it. Many times I have looked up baking directions on the betty crocker website for a box of brownies or a cake mix. Thank God for the internet. Anyway, the point of me telling you about the annoying import stickers is that the stick of butter I got out for the cheesecake crust had the import sticker placed crookedly on wrapper. For the first time ever I could clearly see the ounce markings on the wrapper. And to my horror, I realized that some of the markings I had been using to measure out ounces were really the top of the number 1. But usually the wrapper covers up the oz. next to the number 1, so I thought it was another marking line! And so, ladies and gentleman, the mystery of the underbaked, overbaked, and rock-hard cookies is solved. I was using approximately HALF the butter my recipes called for in all my cookie baking. Remember at the beginning when I said baking cookies in China requires a brain???
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