Adventures in baking

Baking – good; cooking – NOT!

I love baking.

I love to make cookies and squares and sweet loafs – for myself to snack on and for others to enjoy as well. When you bake, you can clean up the mess while the stuff is baking, and you end up with a clean kitchen and enough food for a week.

When you cook, you make a mess, the food is gone in about 30 seconds, and you’re left with a disaster in your kitchen. (Or maybe it’s just me that seems to get every pot and prep bowl and utensil dirty while making a “one-pot” meal, lol!)

Growing up, my mom always had fresh-baked sweets on hand. Whenever we had company (or even just our own family), she would arrange the goodies on a plate beautifully.

I seem to have inherited this desire to share sweet, yummy things with those around me, although my goody-arranging skills seem to have fallen off considerably. (And how did mom manage to bake 3 different things at the same time with no wasted effort or time??? A mystery I have yet to solve!)

No oven? No problem!

Baking in my desert home isn’t quite as easy as baking in Canada.

Last winter when I first arrived here to settle in, I didn’t even have a stove – just a 2-burner gas cooktop. Of course that didn’t stop me, and I did attempt to make apple crisp, bread, banana loaf, and cookies ON THE STOVETOP. Thank you Google! I didn’t even know it was possible.

My efforts weren’t what I’d call 100% successful, lol, but I ate everything anyway. Ali and his brother weren’t as convinced, thinking that pale = uncooked. Their loss. More for me, lol.

The little gas stove that (sort of) could…

Then Ali got me a small stove. It’s gas-powered and very tiny, but I had given him the measurements of my non-stick cookie sheet beforehand and it fits. Barely.

I am not an expert with gas stoves. Not even remotely. Most of my life I’ve had an electric stove. Soooo easy. When I moved back in with my mom, she had a gas stove, but it was big and fancy, with fans and convection and electric starters, so it was just like baking in my electric oven. Still easy.

This one isn’t fancy. For one thing, the stove is nowhere near the only electrical outlet in the kitchen, so it has to be lit with a lighter every time. No pilot light. And if we don’t happen to have a long-handled lighter around, it gets more difficult still. The gas comes from a beat-up old tank that sits beside the stove. Butane, I think. (Today the gas ran out before my coffee was ready – the horror!)

Anyway, the oven has a bottom element and a grill (broiler?) element on the top. We’ve yet to figure out how to light the top element. As it is, I always try to light the bottom one while leaning as far away as possible, as sometimes the gas lights with a bit of an explosion. Yes, really.

There are 2 settings. Big flame or little flame. That’s it. So forget about adjusting the temperature. Maybe I’ll bring an oven thermometer from Canada next time, but really, the little flame doesn’t make the oven hot enough anyway, so big flame it is!

Again, thanks to Google, I was able to find out how to bounce and equalize the heat in a gas stove using the two broiler pans that came with the stove. Put one at the very bottom and one at the top. Stick the baking sheet or loaf pan in the middle, rotate it half-way through baking, and call it good.

Stuff still doesn’t brown all that well, so baking dark-coloured things is better if you don’t want stuff looking too anaemic. I recently made bread that tasted delicious but was pasty pasty pale. I ate the whole loaf with butter and made french toast from the last few pieces. Great comfort food!

Missing ingredients – time to get creative!

Then there’s the issue of ingredients. Last year, I brought stuff from Canada, because I didn’t know what I’d be able to get here in Morocco, especially with internal travel restricted due to Covid-19. I discovered there are some things I can find in Errachidia, which is where I fly to after arriving in Casablanca. But Errachidia is about a 2-hour drive away from our house in the desert, and without a car…

This last time I simply didn’t have the space in my bags to bring foodstuffs, so I had to make do.

For example, there’s no brown sugar here. (Maybe in supermarkets in big cities?) So I have to make my own. Google tells me to mix white sugar with molasses to make brown sugar. Great! Except we have no molasses either lol. Undaunted, I make brown sugar using date syrup. Date syrup is very similar to molasses in that it’s thick and dark and sweet and treacly. Hey, it works. You can get date syrup everywhere here (lots of date palm trees!), and people make their own, which is superior to store-bought but apparently very labour-intensive. Ali mixes it with olive oil and dips bread in it for breakfast, and it gets added to cooking as well.

Recently when I asked Ali to replenish my supply of granulated sugar, something got lost in the translation and I ended up with a box of sugar cubes instead. Ali said we could grind them with the mortar and pestle rather than take them back to the nearby village to exchange them. Me, I thought that was way too much work, so I gave this job to Ali, lol. He gave up partway through.

In Morocco I’m not sure what they use for baking, but Moroccan tea is made with solid sugar. Not cubes – a giant foot-long cone of hard-as-rock sugar. You hit it with a literal rock to break off big chunks, which are then boiled directly in with the tea in tiny steel teapots over the fire. There’s a whole ritual to tea-making here.

So, when I wanted to make ginger snaps for Christmas, I had to grind my own cloves in the mortar and pestle (a wooden version, so yes, there was the odd woody bit in my cookies lol), make my own brown sugar, and substitute date syrup for molasses. Actually they turned out pretty well! Certainly we enjoyed eating them!

Chocolate chip cookie challenge

When we’d finished the ginger snaps and banana loaf and raspberry-oat squares that I’d made on Christmas Eve, my sweet tooth demanded that I make something else. (Plus, a mud-and-straw house is chilly in the winter, so baking in the evening really helps to warm the place up!)

I decided I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. I started to assess my ingredients. Hmmm…

No granulated sugar. Ali, starting grinding those sugar cubes! Luckily Ali likes eating my baked goods, so was more than happy to help.

No brown sugar. Jenn, start whisking date syrup into the freshly ground sugar! Well, you know what they say about molasses in January – SLOWWWWW. The same holds true for cold date syrup. I should have heated it up first and/or added it to the liquid ingredients directly – lesson learned! It took forever to get the clumps down to a reasonably small size.

No salted butter. Oh well, I can add salt to the recipe.

Butter was too hard. It was chilly in the kitchen, so the butter was too hard to cream with the baby hand-mixer that we have (with solar power, we are always hyper-aware of how much energy things draw, so sadly, a huge Kitchen-Aid stand mixer is out of the question). So I melted it. Well, that meant that the butter, sugar and eggs didn’t cream to fluffiness. I ended up having to add more flour, which made the batter a tad stiff, so I had to adjust the amount of oats later. No problem. Doable.

Oh yeah, also…

No chocolate chips! Another job for Ali! Previously, I’d had him buy several large, plain chocolate bars for just this purpose. Unwrap them, put them in a heavy-duty zip-loc freezer bag (brought from Canada) and whack the bag on the cement floor using the wooden pestle until you have chocolate-chip-sized pieces! Of course I had to explain what size chocolate chips are, but he got the job done. Normally I’d do the chocolate-whacking myself (quite fun and a great stress-reliever!), but my elbow tendonitis has been acting up lately so I enlisted help this time.

The end result? A big batch of delicious, gooey, chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. Perfect! Warm from the oven? Heaven on earth!

Even after giving some to a friend and sending some to Ali’s family in Rissani, we still had a TON, but boy, they were really good, so they didn’t last long!

When the weather is crisp, make apple crisp

It’s pretty cold tonight. Maybe I’ll make an apple crisp. I even have apples! lol