Mixing Bowl, Flour, Sugar, Calculator

When I was in Boston, I would bake something—banana bread, muffins, scones—about twice a week, sometimes much more often. Since August 10th, I have baked one thing: brownies, from a Ghirardelli mix my mom included in a care package (thanks, Mom!!). I had lots of excuses: getting red tape straightened out, concentrating on my new classes, hanging out with my new roommates and new friends, biking. But mostly, I was gearing up for the extravaganza that is slipping back into the intricacies of European baking.

In addition to the excitement of adding conversion factors to each ingredient measurement, there's the fun fact that the Netherlands isn't really a baking kind of country. I'm sure that plenty of people bake things, but I'm equally sure that the prevalence of daily, fresh baked goods in all of the supermarkets, markets, and warme bakkers is because of (or in reaction to) a lower popularity of the make-it-yourself attitude that's so prevalent in Germany and Britain.

I'm basing this largely on the difficulty of finding, and strange quality of, baking ingredients. In my grocery store, which is conveniently right downstairs from my apartment, the sugar is kept in a cool cupboard along with the coffee milk. Lesson: sugar is meant for putting in hot drinks, not for baking.

Then there's flour. Flour was not one of the words I learned in my year of beginning Dutch classes, so I looked it up in a relatively decent online Dutch-English dictionary. "Bloem," the dictionary said. "Hah!" I said. "Way to spell, dictionary. Bloem means flower. Point to Katherine." I used another dictionary, which gave me "meel." Only I couldn't find anything called meel in the store, just heavy bags of "tarwebloem" near the pancake mix. After three laps of the store, I realized from the back of a pasta package that "tarwe" means wheat, and "bloem" does in fact mean flour. The dictionary had issued a coach's challenge, the language refs had reviewed the play, and my point was taken away.

The easiest thing to substitute, actually, was chocolate chips. Even though they don't sell bags of ready-made chips here (another indication of a non-baking nation), the selection of chocolate is vast and varied. A bar of 65% was duly purchased, chopped up, and baked into the best kind of banana bread: the kind with chocolate.