Adventures in baking

In honour of Valentine's Day (Walentyki if you are in Poland), I decided to bake some cookies for my team.

Thanks to my horribly expensive junk food order from Canada I have chocolate chips. Chocolate chip cookies are not common here, so I thought they would be a special treat for the Poles.

My challenges started in the baking aisle. I had to call one of my writers in order to determine that brown sugar, a key ingredient in all chocolate chip cookies, is not available at most Polish grocery stores.

Then I saw something called wanillowy aromat in the baking aisle. It appeared to be vanilla extract, but I was a little suspicious of the word aromat. It seemed too close to aromatic to be extract.

My writer confirmed that in Poland we don't have vanilla extract for taste, just to enhance the smell. I bought it anyway.

When I got home I realized that I don't have a cookie sheet. Nor do I have baking soda. But everything else seemed in order, so I improvised with some glass casserole dishes, white sugar and skipped the baking soda. Who knows what that's for anyway . . .

The recipe on the back of the chipits package didn't actually call for vanilla extract, but since I bought it, I thought I'd throw it in to see how it enhances the smell.

My cookie dough is very, very smelly.

The first batch took a lot longer to cook in my oven than the recipe suggested. When finally done, the cookies seemed a little pale, but edible. So to speed things up a bit, I decided to bake one batch in my normal oven and one in my toaster oven.

Oddly enough the toaster oven cooks much faster then the real oven, even though the temperature is supposedly the same. The first (and only) batch from the toaster oven burnt after 5 minutes, and I had a few anxious moments wondering if the fire trucks would show up downstairs again. No sign of them yet, but I've decided to stick with the real oven for now.

I hope my team appreciates these.

Two weeks ago I made Nanaimo bars, which were a big hit, even though they didn't set properly and turned out more like Nanaimo pudding. One of the guys asked me if they were a special Canadian treat for Pancake (Shrove) Tuesday, as I brought them in that day.

I'm thinking I should stop trying to adapt Canadian recipes to Polish ingredients and just start to learn how to make Polish baked goods.