Cultural Day – Christmas and New Years

“Hey I don't know if you have a mixer, I am assuming that you don't, so I am thinking that you should use this recipe, this is your great Grammy Daeufer's recipe.”

Here is a brief list of ingredients I don’t have: chocolate chips, baking powder, brown sugar, molasses to make improvised brown sugar using white sugar, imitation vanilla, vanilla extract, confectioner’s sugar and Kitchen Aid mixers.

What I do have: broken up chocolate bars, Dr. Oetker’s Backpulver, plain white sugar that I’ve mixed with the small amount of remaining brown sugar that I had left, vanilla sugar to add at least some vanilla flavoring and my two hands.

If my host sister would have been home, I would have had her take several actions shots of me in the kitchen as I prepared chocolate chip cookies, chocolate cake, brownies and cut-outs for the teachers and students of my school. I couldn’t help but laughing about the mixer question as I broke down and mixed the 5 cups of flour in the cut-out dough by hand. I have to add that all baking and cooking is highly, highly improvised here. Ingredients, baking temperatures and times, baking surfaces. Everything. And for the most part, after six hours in the kitchen the last two days, it turned out really well. I put out a giant tray of cookies in the teacher’s room and got a bunch of “te lumshin duart,” an Albanian compliment that means “bless your hands.”



I then had a cultural day with around fifteen English students where we discussed American holiday traditions at this time of the year. I made a Power Point with pictures that I used to explain our traditions. Part of our goals as Peace Corps Volunteers is to explain and exchange American culture, and I think this cultural day was successful in doing that.