Caucasus Cookies!

We got paid yesterday. Naturally, I thought of all the things I could do with this money involving food, so I decided to bake cookies!

After a quick Google search for "baking in the Caucasus region" yielded this recipe, I decided to follow it and see what all it'd taste like!

Sans oatmeal. Cause really, that just gets in the way of chocolate.

Having no real mental scale for what grams are in terms of, well, anything (THANKS STUPID AMERICA), I went ahead and started gathering these materials at the store. Surprisingly, all of them were fairly easy to scrounge up. The hardest part was realizing that the bags of white powder that were next to the salt were, actually, more salt, and not sugar like I thought. It was also amusing to me that the baking powder and vanilla powder were by the coffees and teas instead of the other baking things. Additionally hilarious was that the butter was in a freezer.

Georgian supermarket shenanigans aside, my friend Sophia came over and we started the baking process.

Ingredients!

We chopped up the chocolate bars into little chunks, and then decided that there clearly was not enough chocolate. Not pictured above is another bar of white chocolate, so we threw that in as well. My family doesn't really have a scale or measuring cups, so instead we used a wine glass to measure things, because if there's one thing that every Georgian knows, it's that the wine glasses are 100mg. We decided to double the recipe, and soon realized that the called for amounts were going to yield bizarre cookies. In the end, we put in slightly more flour (per my sisters advice), way less sugar, and a little less butter (maybe. I'm not 100% sure how much butter I even bought, let alone how much we put in, since the package was all in Georgian and was completely devoid of any type of identifiable quantity), but the taste test of the batter confirmed that we were on the right track. The crazy German brown sugar I bought is actually large crystals instead of fine granules. I debated grinding it up, but then forgot to. However, it still tasted normal and delicious, so no harm done.

After sitting in the petchi (wood burning iron stove of amazingness) for less than 10 minutes, the first batch came out. I should mention that we didn't use the actual oven on account of it being full of pots and pans and isn't actually used to prepare food. We, instead, bake with either the crazy Russian Easy Bake oven in the living room, or the lower part of the petchi. Or, like last night, we light a fire in the fireplace and then roast meat over the glowing embers, thus causing the house to smell like pinecones, fire, and barbecued pork. But back to the cookies! Since the pan was super hot, and there was no room to put it on the table, we did the natural thing:

Yeah, that's right. We just put it on the floor.
I fucking love this place.

Ani let me do the honors of taking the cookies off the pan, and even sang me a little celebratory and triumphant tune as she handed me the scraper. Myself, Ani, Sophia, and Goga (my host brother), all armed with cookies, cheers'd one another and took our first bites at the same time.

Please let it be known that I make bomb ass cookies, even with zero measuring and with less than ideal ingredients.

The cookies themselves are slightly more cakelike, almost fluffy in texture. It was weird the first bite, but considering where we are, it's almost fitting. Georgians love cakes. I've had three cakes over the last two weeks in school for various reasons. Even the baked goods here, like their sweet breads, are more akin to cakes instead of bread or American cookie textures. I think it's a part of the result of using baking powder and not baking soda maybe? Unsure, but Ani informed me that these cookies were better than the ones her last American made and really, that's all that matters.

Yum!