Baking in a Strange Land

In tenth grade, my best friends and I had an unofficial but sacredly observed tradition of baking every Friday. There were three of us, one of which is a baking demigoddess who left us with no shortage of sweets. We tried out just about everything that year; berry cobblers, apple pies, raspberry bars, all sorts of cakes, frying our own doughnuts and a memorable Bûche de Noël with meringue mushrooms.
[Our principal ran into us as we were very seriously discussing the 'shrooms'.
"What was that about shrooms??"
We sheepishly showed him the chocolate hunk of a log with the sugary fungi.
"Oh- those mushrooms."]

Keep in mind, we were a group of three.

[Three girls one dessert..]
Although we certainly tried, I'm not sure we ever made it through an entire cake, which means we made a lot of friends that year auctioning off leftovers.
[Same concept for making friends still applies. As long as it involves food, it's foolproof.]
Ever since that year, I've been hooked. I can't say I've baked as often as I'd have liked to, or tried out as many recipes, but I do enjoy it and bake whenever I have an occasion to.

What better occasion to bake then, than being in another country?
Looking forward to baking all sorts of American goodies for my host family, I planned ahead, even bringing my own measuring cup/tablespoon/teaspoon set, having read online that German baking uses weight- as opposed to the U.S., which uses volume.
[In other words, in the U.S., a cup of sugar is a cup of flour is a cup of milk etc etc. 
In Germany, each of those is different, since you'll be using a kitchen scale to weigh your ingredients.]

However, as prepared as I [thought] I was, I ended up with one baking disaster after another after another :(

Fruit soup for the soul.

This first mess had actually nothing to do with measurement/ingredient differences. This supposed berry cobbler came from a German recipe, and was made by my lovely German friends at a joint dinner gathering. Something went wrong though as the oven tried to work its magic, with our frozen berries somehow turning the whole thing into a berry soup with a crust. Attempts to disguise the goop with sprinkles and a need to eat this with a spoon helped this noteworthy experience make the list.

Things didn't turn out much better with American recipes.

Batch two was significantly more edible.

The first problem I ran into was while making sugar cookies. Thinking they were a fairly safe bet, alarm bells started to go off when my batter turned green.
What?
 It turns out the vegetable oil my host mom pointed me towards was, quite literally, vegetable oil.
As in it turned my sugar cookies green and made them smell like vegetables.
With flawless reasoning, I stuck them in the oven anyway.
Maybe it will bake out, like alcohol!
Right?
No.
The second batch, however, with sunflower seed oil, turned out fabulously [as seen by how few were left:) ].

My next venture into overseas baking was with a classic Devil's Food Cake. Although I didn't have any significant problems in the process of making this, it fell a little flat... literally. As opposed to being fluffy and decadent, it was rather dense and sad-looking...

I later learned that baking powder and flour are a bit different in Germany... the flour is a bit 'heavier', and the baking powder isn't as potent. 

Chemistry):

The baking powder issue persisted when I made pancakes. Although they tasted fine, they simply weren't as fluffy as in the U.S.

A taste of home <3

My most recent enterprise was making chocolate chip cookies, which became a lengthier process than it ever was back home.
To begin with, there are no chocolate chips here. There are little chocolate drops that are similar, but not the creamy milky chocolate that Hersheys has spoiled us with. So, I ended up buying huge slabs of milk chocolate, melting them, and making my own chocolate chips:)

There would've been more if I hadn't
eaten half the chocolate.

The second problem was a bit trickier; there's no brown sugar in Germany.
Brown sugar, as you find it in a grocery store here, it the same as granulated sugar but with bigger grains, and colored brown.
No problem, I thought- you can make brown sugar with molasses and white sugar!
Germany doesn't have molasses either.

Close enough...

After some research, I ended up substituting sugar cane syrup for molasses [1 tbsp syrup for every cup white sugar], which doesn't have the same deep smoky taste at all, but gave the sugar the moisture necessary to make soft, chewy, melt-in-your-mouth, good ol' Amercan chocolate chip cookies.
Substituting a substitute for a substitute alongside another substitute in the same recipe. Bah.

They actually turned out quite nicely; I made both sugar cookies[not green this time] and chocolate chip for a dinner party my host mom hosted, and they were referred to as 'American pastries' the whole night.
And then they were gone. :')

Fancy fare.

Green cookies and fruit soup and substituting messes; baking is something in and of itself on this exchange.
But.
It's so, so worth it.

Die Deutsche Sprache

When i first started learning German, people were encouraging.

They kept saying,

"You'll pick it up quickly, it's really similar to English!"

 Let's see...

 ------------------------------------------------------

In German, also means so, whereas the English also translates to auch.

So, also does not mean also.

Eis [pronounced ice] is ice cream.

Don't ask for that in your water :(
 

Ordering peperoni pizza will result in peppers on your cheese rather than pepperoni.

A scarf is a Shal-

A shawl is a Shal as well.

A handy [although handy] is a cell phone.

A handy object would be considered praktisch.

We call ballerina flats just flats, whereas German makes use of the other half of the word, calling them ballerinas.

Which sounded ridiculous at first [I'm wearing ballerinas. On my feet.], but wearing flats isn't any more logical, with a flat being synonymous with a condominium.

[I'm wearing living spaces on my feet, aha..]

Art isn't art- it's a type of something, whereas art translates to kunst.

There's certainly more than one art of art though.

If it's starting to rain lightly, don't try using the word Mist- that would be manure

If someone offers you gift [stranger or otherwise], you should by no means accept it; it's not a gift-- rather, poison is the English word.

You'll look a little odd winking an eye if you wink, seeing as winken means to wave.

And the worst one of all---

A million is a Million, 

but an English billion is a Milliarde,

whereas a trillion is a Billion.

What.

-------------------------------------------------

German and English being similar?

That right there is the problem.

Thanks, false friends.

However, that's to say absolutely nothing of German grammar...

And not even the nitpicky, complex, advanced grammar.

Just basic, necessary, everyday nouns are impossible.

Thanks, der/die/das.

And then there's the problem of straight-up English

 being pumped into the language at every given opportunity.

Thanks, globalization.

 

Ich liebe die Deutsche Sprache <3 <3 <3

Süßes oder Saures?

Right off the bat, I'd like to say I hope you're all reading this with a big tub of accumulated candy:)

Halloween in Germany was quite a different experience from that in America.

Although making jack-o'-lanterns is a popular activity here as well, that's about as far as decorating usually goes. Unless a party is being thrown [in which case there are fake webs and candles and spiders galore], houses just don't get decorated.

None of this at all :(

Trick of treating is strictly for little kids here- none of the obnoxious middle and high school kids [of which I may or may not have been one of] trying to get in on the fun. In addition, rather than saying 'trick or treat', kids say 'Süßes oder Saures?'-- literally translating to 'sweets or sours?'.
[Although there were two little witches who came to our door and sang some chant or other, which was pretty impressive:) ]

However, the biggest difference is in dressing up. First off, students don't get dressed up at all going to school [awww...] and not everyone does when going out at night.
But when they do, they only dress up as scary, 'typical' Halloween beasties.

A ghoul of a host brother.

When asking around what people are dressing up as, the only answers I got were as vampires, devils, monsters, witches, and the like. None of our American cutesie Disney princess and Dorothy of Oz get-ups; real horrors come out to play when the sun goes down. Which isn't to say that there aren't cute costumes-- only that there's more Halloween spirit in the sense of all things scary and supernatural, as opposed to the "let's eat lots of candy!" vibe one gets in the U.S.
[Not that there's anything at all wrong with that.]

The best part though? The following day is a holiday, letting us sleep off the previous night's shenanigans-- an absolutely brilliant idea, in my opinion:)

Paprika flavoured Pringle puppy

Regardless, whether in Germany or America or anywhere else in the world,

Happy [late] Halloween!(: