My Latest Adventure

Sometimes, in a foreign country, you don't have to take a trip to have an adventure.  Sometimes, you can have an adventure right in your own home.  Take, for example, my latest adventure: my first attempt at baking in the Ladas kitchen.  It has taken me this long (over three weeks!) to accumulate the materials that I needed - I downgraded my recipe from my favorite pound cake to a simpler batch of thumbprint cookies.  I made the recipe without the vanilla extract that it calls for because I haven't been able to find it.  The green bottle is what I took to be a good guess at vanilla in the store.  Don't those look like vanilla flowers on the label?  Anyway, when I got it home and smelled it, it was definitely not vanilla.  In fact, it smells kind of like that mastiha that I tasted at the restaurant.  Not going in the cookies.

Take a look at the small bags of sugar and flour that I found - that's my hand in the picture for comparison.  They are 1 kg apiece, and that's apparently as big as they come! I bought a pizza pan in lieu of a cookie sheet because neither the AB nor the Carrefour seems to carry them.  They have bread pans, roast pans, bundt pans, but no cookie sheets.  Seriously?  It's not like I'm looking for a specialized piece of equipment, here... And I've seen cookies in the bake shops.  What do they cook them on?  In the checkout line with my pizza pan I also realized that I wasn't sure if we had a mixing bowl.  We didn't.  I ended up using a combination of a salad bowl, a rectangular tupperware, and a soup kettle.  (The salad bowl was too shallow, resulting in flying globules of sugared butter.  I then transferred the dry ingredients from the soup kettle that they were in to the tupperware so that I could use the soup kettle for the mixing.  Problem solved.)

The batter was delicious.  I give credit to the Danish butter, which I purchased because it was one of the few kinds that was not spreadable (and that the sample lady wasn't blocking at the time.  You know how sample people can kind of scare you?  Trust me, it's even worse if they speak another language.)  I loaded up the pizza pan with balls of dough, and Eleni, who was also home at the time, put in the jam.  In they went into the stoven.  What is a stoven, you ask?  Behold the photograph.  Remember the episode of How I Met Your Mother when Lily gets her own apartment and the fridge, sink, etc. are connected?  Well, the stoven is kind of like that - an  oven and a stove, all in one - two eyes on top and a convection oven on bottom; we have three of them in Ladas.  Since it's a convection oven, the cookies were done in about half the time, so I charred the first batch.  The second and third batches (minus snackage) are pictured below.  They have a slightly more shortbread-y taste here than they did when I made them in my campus apartment, whether its due to the convection oven or the Danish butter.  Either way, they are delicious.  But that pound cake may have to wait a while...