Baking in a foreign land

Certain things are surprisingly different in Spain. Initially, one of the challenges was knowing where to go to buy essential items like toothpaste (Pharmacy) or bleach (still don’t really know). Or where to get things that we’ve never needed before like salt for the dishwasher. Does anyone else know about this? Apparently there’s a hole in the bottom of our dishwasher for salt?!? But one of the things that we have really been missing is home baked goods. At home, I can whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies and fill the house with that caramel aroma in half an hour. But I have yet to find a source for good brown sugar. This hasn’t been a huge problem, just one of those small things that we miss. But with Kaia’s birthday coming up, I knew that I wanted to make her a birthday cake but it was so difficult finding all the different items. The hardest items to find were baking powder, powdered sugar, and good milk. I was wary of new items because of something that happened when we first got to Spain.

When we first traveling in Galicia in northern Spain, we rented a little Airbnb apartment in the small fishing town of Fisterra and because the restaurants open for dinner so late, we wanted to cook an earlier dinner at home. I planned to make stir fried noodles because I found some noodles in the store there. But I could not find any soy sauce or sesame oil so I thought I would make do with salt. I could not find the salt. Up and down the store, no salt. I finally found a tiny section with spices and thought, ‘Aha! there must be salt here.’ Hidden on a bottom shelf I found a bottle that said, ‘Sal’, success! So I cooked everything up and started to salt it. Tasting it, there was not much flavor, so I added more salt. We sat down to eat. But the lack of flavor was still pretty bad so we all started to sprinkle more salt on our plates, lots of it. Then I noticed that underneath the word ‘Sal,’ were the words ‘sodium bicarbonato’. Yes, I had been flavoring our dinner with baking soda, which I now know, has absolutely no flavor. Apparently, large amounts can be an irritant but luckily no one got sick.

So after the baking soda fiasco I was really careful to make sure I got the right items. After several weeks of sourcing everything, I finally found baking powder in one part of the grocery store, powdered sugar in another section of the grocery store (the sugar section), and vanilla extract in a whole other store. All the milk in the grocery store tastes like water though. A lot of it is the shelf stable variety which the kids won’t touch but even the refrigerated milk lacked flavor. So we also found a bakery a few blocks away with whole milk that tastes like it does at home and comes in a refillable glass bottle! hurray! And while not essential, I also found sprinkles for Kaia’s cake.

We had a nice party for Kaia last weekend with a couple of friends from school as well our friends David, Melinda, and Inigo’s families. Our little girl is 6 and really into headstands!