Thursday March 9, 2006 – Sweet Biscuits

My purchase today of Romany Creams – “Crunchy Choc Coconut Biscuits” reminded me of my first delve into baking in Cyprus a week and a half ago. Being the football watching, mechanic, tough guy that I am, I had been holding back a desire to bake cookies for way too long. Since all my recipes are in “American,” I had to get creative in calculating my measurements. Early on in this Cyprus adventure, I determined that one of our small glasses could serve as my measuring cup. After eyeballing a Coke can, filling it with water, converting it to cups, taking the square root of the cubed polynomial, pouring it into my glass…long story short the glass is pretty darn close to a “cup” for baking purposes. Armed with my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook, my glass cup, an eyeball for the teaspoon/tablespoon measurements, and the ingredients I mustered together (resorting to chopping up two semi-sweet chocolate bars since Cyprus chocolate chips are “shite”), I began the process of ball parking chocolate chip cookies using my less than precise measurements. Seeing as I would practically sell my soul for a bag of shredded coconut, I tossed a hearty portion in at the last minute. At this point I began to miss an electric mixer, but I put my back into it and pressed on with my dinner fork. Eleven minutes of baking later, I determined that I had a pretty good batch of cookies on my hands.

Seeing that it was Kane’s last day in the office and I had to swing by the office anyways, I decided to drop off a couple dozen along with a small container of milk. Little did I know that that one cookie incident would spread like wildfire. That evening the “Cast of Characters” invited me out to dinner (this was when "C" was stateside) and kept going on and on about how they gorged themselves on the fabulous “biscuits.” The next day I ran into Nichos’ (partner) wife at the store and she said how he “couldn’t stop talking about the sweet biscuits you made.” She insisted on getting the recipe, because apparently the brownies she makes occasionally don’t demand that acclaim. When "C" was picked up from the airport by the taxi driver (used often by the firm), he began telling her how he heard that “your husband made some wonderful sweet biscuits…” So needless to say, this whole cookie/sweet biscuit (apparently “cookie” is an American word) got a bit out of hand.