As most of my friends and family know, I love to bake. It is a huge stress reliever for me, I love having people tell me how delicious my creations are, and honestly I love to eat- especially sweet stuff.
I’m not biased in what I bake. I bought a wonderful cookie scoop to help me dish out no-bakes or oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I love buying fruit so I can put it in a pie. Most recently, I have been experimenting (as well as fulfilling friendly requests) with making cheesecakes- triple chocolate, peanut butter, eggnog, key lime, and my favorite pumpkin. A good friend of mine treated me to the Cheesecake Bible which I have been looking forward to using and adapting to my own recipes. However, her gift came right before my sudden move to the Netherlands and alas, no beautiful sweet or savory cheesecakes have graced my springform pan since the move.
There have been many logistical issues while pursing my baking hobby here in the Netherlands. The first issue is ingredients. Instead of the extra large, lighted, and air conditioned grocery stores with entire aisles devoted to those who bake from a box and those who prefer to bake from scratch, I now frequent small 4-aisle stores with a small bookshelf sized portion for baking. Some ingredients, after much searching, are easy to figure out. For example, bags of flour look like flour. However, other ingredients have been more elusive. I have not been able to find baking soda. When I translated it into Dutch with the handy app on my phone, I was led to household cleaning items and handed a bag of toilet cleaner. Some ingredients are much more expensive here and therefore will only be purchased for the most special of occasions. For example, the cheesecakes I enjoyed presenting to my friends usually use 3-4 blocks of cream cheese. Although Philadelphia cream cheese is available here, it comes in much smaller packages for a higher price. I might have to learn to make cheesecake with the ever present Gouda.
Another issue I’m facing is my missing baking instruments. My cookie sheets, muffin tins, cake pans are all missing. They could very well be in a box that immediately got placed in our attic storage space but they could also be in an old banana box back in the States at my old place.
It doesn’t matter where they are though because they wouldn’t fit in my tiny microwave/convection oven combo. The sad fact is that I don’t have an oven! We have a tiny contraption that frozen pizzas struggle to fit into. So far it has been a scary contraption that when used as a microwave can’t have metal in it but any other time it can. One day it briefly caught on fire when I forgot to turn the microwave function off while making toast.
I have made some attempts to bake despite the logistical issues. I bought a small round pan that fits nicely in the tiny oven contraption. The first attempt was an apple crisp to bring to Gearoid’s work colleague’s house for dinner. After pressing what I thought was the right combination of buttons to “bake” the crisp, the apples were underdone and the oatmeal topping was a little overdone. I ended up buying an apple tart. It didn’t stop us from enjoying the less than perfect desserts ourselves.
I also attempted peanut butter cookies to thank Gearoid’s work colleagues for their hospitality. Despite the pure peanut butter (no hydrogenated oil and trans-fats in the PB here) and being able to bake only 4 cookies at a time, I was able to produce tasty yet crumbly cookies.
The baking will hopefully get better and we may treat ourselves to a proper oven if and when I finally am allowed to get a paying job here (more news on that later).
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