Baking Cookies for Our Potluck!

So Thursday night we were all out late into the morning clubbing, so Friday night we had a chill girls night in potluck and movie night. I had been wanting to make cookies ever since arriving here, so that was to be my contribution.

I went to Mercadona, the big supermercado close to my piso, to buy my ingredientes. Differences/problems:

-They had no vanilla extract. What they did have, said Juan the employee, was vanilla de rama (vanilla beans) and white granulated sugar flavored vanilla! Interesting. I figured neither would work, so I 86'ed the vanilla extract.

-Chocolate chips! None of those either. I found some muffins with chocolate chips in them and showed the chips to an employee and asked her where to find them, and received the response "No tengo ningun idea". Hmmm. So I ended up improvising and I bought some chocolate fideos, sprinkles, and then a milk chocolate bar which I chopped up into little chunks for my cookies.

-Ovens here are weird. Well, that's to be expected, as all the appliances are weird. There is no temperature on the oven, you just light the gas and warm the bottom of the cookies, and then turn it off, move the tray to the top of the oven, and relight the oven this time on the top, and warm them that way. Many steps, and you have to babysit them to watch their baking process! Fun.

They turned out awesome! I made chocolate chunk and peanut butter cookies. My roommate Lidia saw them and asked if they were dulces, sweets. They don't even know they're cookies here! It is very uncommon to make cookies from scratch here, she had never seen them made before!

Super yummy. And the rest of our potluck dinner was delicious too:

Kelsey and Armelle: vegetable stew

Adrienne: mushroom and cheese risotto

Henna: apple pie

Alison: homemade california rolls, sushi!

It was an excellent dinner.