Day 9

Day 9 - Christmas Eve Cookies 'n More

For Christmas Eve, we had decided to make some desserts to bring to the family get together at Ana's aunt's house, and picked up the ingredients the day before. Ana made the cheesecake entirely by herself before helping me with the cookies. As I mentioned before, they don't really have chocolate chip cookies in Brazil. They closest thing to real cookies that I have seen is some Oreo knock-offs. I found a recipe for chocolate chunk cookies online somewhere and just started running with it without reading too far into it. Once I had mixed the dry ingredients in one bowl and gotten to other bowl with the sugar, egg, and butter in it, I realized that the recipe didn't have any refined sugar in it, just brown sugar. Now, I've never made cookies with just brown sugar, so it's possible that they would have turned out fine, but I felt the need to put refined sugar in because I was more "sure of the result." I looked around at a bunch of recipes online and saw that the ratio of sugar to brown sugar was all over the board. While this meant that I was pretty much free to do whatever amount I wanted, it also wasn't real helpful for making a decision. I finally decided to swap 1 cup of brown sugar for refined sugar and just deal with the results.

We had made a double batch of cookies, and the oven here is fairly small, so baking all of the cookies took over an hour of swapping cookies, putting them on racks to cool, dropping more dough onto cookie sheets, rinse, repeat. I may not have mentioned it yet, but it's rediculuously hot here, and running around in the kitchen with the oven going is even less fun than it is at home. But it was all worth it after that first bite, the cookies were pretty damn good. We tried to feed one to Ana's niece (who is 6) and after barely getting the cookie in her mouth she decided that she didn't like it. Now, I'm pretty sure that a six year old not liking chocolate chip cookies is a crime against childhood, but Ana assured me that she doesn't like anything and I shouldn't take it personally. No problem, I assure her, that just leaves more cookies for me.

After we were done with the cookies, we headed out to Ana's aunt's house where the rest of her family was gathered. It honestly wasn't too much different from most of the holiday family get togethers that I've been to. There was turkey and beer and lots of people sitting around talking and laughing. There were even kids playing playstation in the other room. If there had been stuffing, cranberry sauce, and a Christmas tree (and the temperature outside had been 25 F instead of 25 C) I could have believed I was back at home. I'm just happy that the cookies seemed like a big hit, and people made a point to tell me how much they liked them.