The Cookies :: Les Biscuits

Admittedly, I didn't prepare very much.  My dad took care of practically everything, from making sure I got a visa to paying for my year in France.  So imagine my surprise when I found out that I had to make some dessert from my region in the USA.

Luckily for me, past-me got super into cooking (which basically means that past-me watched a bunch of cooking shows), so current-me now has a bunch of recipes saved on my iTouch (not even my blog is safe from the reaches of Apple).

I would call this promotion, but have you seen that PRICE??

So I flipped through my notes app, and found my chocolate chip cookie recipes from five years ago, and became all hyped up about eating cookies, and was like, "Let's do this!"

Some of my YFU friends realized that they were in France as soon as they stepped off the plane.  Another got the feeling as soon as he saw his host family.  I honestly didn't really get that feeling until I realized that THEY DON'T HAVE MEASURING CUPS IN FRANCE.

only really cute red shoes

I changed schools a lot, so going to a new high school didn't really shock me.  Neither did living in a new house, since I've lived in five different places.  

But describing the measuring cup to a Frenchman will give you a feeling of alienation like no other.  At least in all of the five places I had measuring cups and all my friends knew what a measuring cup was (not that we excitedly collaborated over baking techniques).

After I got over my shock that I was, indeed, in France, I rationalized that I could just use Google to convert the measurement.  Didn't work, since, and I realized this after I tried, cups and grams don't measure the same thing.  Grams measure mass.  Cups measure volume.   

I tried the next best thing, Wikipedia, because who doesn't want the advice of a bajillion strangers? (though note that if you don't like strangers, you can't survive in a foreign country) After I gave up on reading Wikipedia in French, I found out that there's THREE TYPES OF MEASURING CUPS, since there's no "internationally agreed standard definition of the cup."

Judy Blume should have prepared me for that

So now I know three definitions for the cup.  From Wikipedia, the metric cup (250 mL), the US legal cup (240 mL), and the US customary cup (236.58823OMGWTF65 mL).

At this point I was just about ready to give up on the cookies (and life) when I remembered that I probably also had to look up conversions for tablespoons and teaspoons.

However, a Glinda the Good Witch arrived in my life in the form of a family friend called Muriel.  He went to New York and brought back some measuring spoons for my host family.  Evidently, my host sister hadn't known what they were, so when I told her that they were for making cookies she was all, "I APPROVE!"

So now, I had one American measurement that I could use for my cookies.  Luckily for me, you can use tablespoons to measure out cups.

guess what I did next

It just shows my dedication (and how much spare time I have) that I measured out the ingredients with just a tablespoon.  Haha, just kidding, I wasn't about to measure out 72 tablespoons of sugar, brown sugar, and flour.  Nah, I took one of their bowls and made a little line on the side to mark a cup.

my chemistry teacher will be proud to know about my precision

Close enough.  Then I remembered that I had to get baking soda as a leavening agent.  I translated it (with my love hate relationship with Google) into "bicarbonate de soude" = sodium bicarbonate.  My host family never used it for baking before, they only knew it was for whitening teeth or cleaning.

Then I had to ask them for chocolate chips! Ohh la la, after all my other problems!  I didn't have google translate with me the day I tried to say chocolate chips, so I ended up blurbing something like, well chocolate chips.

they interpreted it as chocolate covered fried potato slices (chocolate chips)

In the end I didn't even buy chocolate chips.  I just broke some chocolate bars into some tiny morsels (and ate half of them before I put them in the cookie dough...shhhhhh).

I wish I could say that all the cookies turned out perfect and golden, but no.  It's not like the last time, when I burned half of the cookies.  It's much worse than that.

SIX COOKIES WERE UNDERCOOKED

Thankfully (or not, depending on how you look at it), I live with three guys that happily ate over a quarter of the cookies the first day they could.  French people ate MY cookies....and they LIKED them!  

Though of course they told me I used too much butter.  Of course.