Cookies & Christmas

I know, it's too early for this! But I'm allowed to, right? We're past All Saints Day, and there isn't Halloween or Thanksgiving here.

While most of my family is out of town, Melanie is staying over to keep me company. We woke up at an unacceptably late time and then made sugar cookies and chocolate chip cookies while playing lots of Christmas music. It was glorious.

Ignore my singing. Think Christmas and cookies. 

Melanie is so pleased with her method of dough-rolling. 

She did something amazing with a glass, butter and sugar. 

The first batch of sugar cookies. Absolutely beautiful. 

Right?!

This butter.. The chocolate chip cookies called for melted butter that was cooled - not only did our butter cool, but it congealed itself into a disgusting mass of, well, this. 

These cookies look like whole-wheat cookies. Trust me, they aren't. 

Baking in France is a bit different than baking in America. For one, there is the fact that for some reason, the United States was so hipster as to make its own system of measurements for cooking. Thanks! The metric system would've worked just fine! There's the conversion from fahrenheit to celsius, then cups and tablespoons to grams and liters. Then, once you've successfully translated the measurements from US to metric, you have to translate the ingredients from English to French. Baking soda? Bicarbonate de soude. Brown sugar? Doesn't really exist in France! See what a fun game this translating can be? So yes, there is a name for brown sugar, but no, if you go into a grocery store looking for it, you may be lucky (as Melanie and I were) if you find small packets of this sort-of brown sugar stuff. It didn't smell quite right, and it was really dark, hence the "whole-wheat" look.

But despite the small difficulties in trying to bake like an American in France, it was worth it. Telling Marie that she could have all of the cookies? The look on her face (sheer joy, I must tell you) was priceless.