Brugsanvisning på kiks

"Recipe for cookies"

My Danish language class had a great mix of people:

• 4 Canadians
• 3 Poles
• 2 Americans
• 1 Austrian
• 1 Brazilian
• 1 Colombian
• 1 Russian
• 1 Slovanian

Since we have so many different cultures amongst us, we have decided to have traditional dinners from each country - it's a great way to try new food, and a good excuse to hang out with each other and have fun.

On January 23 it was Angela's (from Colombia) birthday, so we decided to throw a surprise party for her and instead of having our traditional "cultural dinner" we decided that everyone would bring something. I decided to make cookies with Daria (from Russia) - that's simple enough!

I got the recipe and translated everything into Danish and then we went to the grocery store to purchase what we needed...which was everything. Most things were easy to find: margarine, eggs (æg), white sugar (hvidt sukker), salt, brown sugar (farin), vanilla.

Somethings were a little more difficult to find:
- Flour (mel). This were so many types of flour it was hard to decide what kind to buy - we weren't sure what was white flour, what was whole wheat, rye, grains, etc.
- Chocolate chips (chokolade). Apparently chocolate chips are not very common. There were plenty of chocolate bars, but no chips - we ended up getting chocolate flakes which worked just as well.
- Baking soda (bagepulver). This gave us the most trouble for sure - we asked two different people where to find it and neither was really sure. In the end we did find some, only to realize when we got home that it was "med krydderier" which means "with spices", and it was brown instead of the traditional white baking soda. The cookies still turned out fine though - they were just chocolate chip/ginger cookies!

The ingredients - complete with translations and conversions

With all of the ingredients we thought that we were ready to start making the cookies - wrong. In Canada, we measure using cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, etc. In Denmark they use grams, so we had to convert everything to grams and then use a scale to measure everything.

Finally, after everything was mixed together, we went to put them in the oven. I don't know why Canada does this: we measure the temperature in celsius, but when it comes to baking, we measure in fahrenheit. I was really confused as to why there was no 350 degrees on the oven until I realized that I needed to convert it to celsius.

Before

After

In the end of our baking fiasco, the cookies turned out just fine. They were a bit harder than when I make them back in Canada, but they had a bit of a ginger taste which made up for the hardness.

We brought the cookies to the party and put them with the rest of the food from all over the world. It was a delicious, fun night, and the surprise was a success!