I love to bake, but it has been unattainable since arriving
in Tanzania. Everything I know how to bake needs an oven (hence it is called
baking). Unfortunately I only have a double hot plate.
Today I could not stand it any longer. So I tried to make
cookies. I looked up a recipe for "no bake" cookies. I found a
recipe for chocolate peanut butter cookies that I had all
the ingredients for... well with a few substitutes. So I attempted to
make them. The result was a liquid mess. It looked like someone was trying to
make brownie mix but added too much water. It was slightly disheartening.
I did not want to wash them down the sink, because I used up
a lot of our ingredients, so I showed them to Justin. He thought they
looked like a start of something good. Justin went across the street and got
eggs and flour. We added an egg, a pinch of baking powder, a pinch of baking
soda (we didn't know which would be better, so we used both), and some flour.
We kept adding flour until we got it looking
something recognizable as batter. We then started to cook them on the
hot plate like a pancake. It took about two hours watching the hot plate to
finish the batch. They resulted in a shapeless chocolate mass that is sweet
and chocolaty. Some of our latter ones looked a little more like cookies.
They do not taste like anything that I have ever had before, but they are
really good.
-Lauren
I've heard of people fabricating ovens by painting boxes black putting food inside of them, and leaving them in the sun. The black absorbs a lot of energy and heats the box enough to cook the food. Don't know if it works but it could be fun to try :)
ReplyDeleteGood job you invented mission chocolate pancakes! I made an oven last year in your kitchen, one pot elevated on a cup inside another pot.... Made a chocolate layer came one layer at a time .. took hours!
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