Another year I was not home for Christmas. This is not a sad tale I promise. So one year ago I decided to move back to Italy this time with an actual job. Since I was in a rush to get back to Italy and get this job moving I missed Christmas with my family and spent it with my second Italian family here in Milan. I have no regrets I’m glad I came when I did. As for this year with only two weeks off I did not feel like it was enough time for the amount of money I would spend. Its ok I’ll make up for it when I’m home for two months during the summer.
Anyways, back to Christmas time. My mom being the over achiever that she is always makes cookies for the entire family. As the family grows so do the cookies. There’s always the classics like chocolate chip and frosted butter cookies and every once in a while she likes to try a new cookie or idea. In other words, there are a lot of freakin cookies in our house around this time of year. Well this year I felt a little left out so I decided to make some of my own.
I am not the skilled cookie maker like my mother (of course) but I think I have spent enough time helping her with these damn things to have learned a thing or two. After a few messages with my mother I had the recipes in my possession and I was ready to bake. One problem, I have to convert all these measurements to European measurements. Insert panic mode. In my mind I was like no biggie this is what the internet is for but once I started my research I quickly learned there wasn’t one exact answer so I had to go with the most reported measurement for the recipe. After I converted all of the recipes I started to panic again because these measurements are weights, meaning I have to weigh everything instead of measure. AP chemistry trauma kicked in and I was stressing, just to remind you no baking has even started. I still haven’t even bought the ingredients. I was stressed out because I remember in ch
emistry weighing things on the scale you had to weigh the bowl or whatever tool you were going to put the product in and subtract that from the total weight with the product to get the weight of the product. Basically I was scared of the amount of math I was going to have to do and what if I forgot to weigh the bowl and take down the weight…ah so many ways to mess this up! So me being me I searched the web to make sure this is how you measure things for baking. Yep that’s right I asked google how to correctly measure things on a kitchen scale. Fun story there is a zero out button on kitchen scales. No math here, just have to remember to push the button. Whoo stress gone. On to the next thing. Ingredients.
Everything is pretty basic flour, butter, sugar, salt, etc. The two ingredients I really struggled with were brown sugar, and chocolate chips. I had to go to an American grocery store to find nestle chocolate chips, because let’s be real anything else just isn’t the same. Brown sugar does not exist here! Their version of brown sugar is cane sugar which is not what I need for cookies. So I ended up finding this dark molasses in the sugar aisle that has the same consistency as brown sugar and it said it could be added to sweets on the package so I crossed my fingers and bought it.
Once the ingredients were bought, the recipes converted and the oven on, making the cookies was very easy. I opted to just make the chocolate chip cookies and frosted butter cookies since I figured if I messed one up at least I had another one to eat
. I invited my good friend over and we made a day of baking cookies and drinking wine. The wine was really because I didn’t have a rolling pin and I needed something to roll the butter cookies out with. Worked great would highly recommend wine bottles for rolling pins. After what felt like days we had cookies! Using the smallest oven and only one cookie sheet we did it! I even have pictures to prove it. Even though I wasn’t home for the holidays, home was with me for the holidays. I even made them Christmas day so that I could taste just a little bit of home.
If you are in Europe or just feel like weighing your ingredients instead I have included the recipes, I used. Happy holidays!
*Note for fluffy and soft chocolate chip cookies add an extra 100 g of flour to your batter*
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Oven: 180 C
Ingredients:
150 g Flour, all purpose
4.2 g baking soda
4.2 g salt
240 g butter, softened
150 g sugar
135 g packed brown sugar (if you can’t find it a dark molasses is fine but use about 20-30 g less)
5 mL vanilla extract
2 large eggs
I say use as much chocolate chips as you want
Instructions:
Mix flour, salt, and baking soda in a small bowl. Beat butter, sugar, brown sugar and vanilla in a large bowl until creamy. Add eggs one at a time. Beat in flour mixture. Stir in the yummy choco chips. Bake 9-11 minutes or until golden.
Rolled Butter Cookies
Oven: 180 C
Ingredients:
240 g butter
130 g sugar
10 mL vanilla
2 eggs
330 g sifted flour
2.1 g salt
Instructions:
Cream butter, add sugar until fluffy. Add 1 egg at a time and vanilla. Stir in flour and salt. Chill for 2 hours. Roll out and cut into desired shapes. Bake for 10 minutes.