From bake to no-bake

Unfortunately for those of us who love to make and eat baked goods, ovens - at least American-style ovens - are not very common in Peru. Exhibit A: at my house, there are two oven options: 1) an enormous wood-burning clay oven (i.e., a contraption I could never use alone), or 2) a small, round, slightly George Forman-esque, one (undetermined) temperature, plug-into-the-wall electric "oven" that sits on the floor. 

A couple weeks into being at site, I was craving some carrot bread. So I figured, why not try out the electric spaceship oven? There are worse ways to fill a Sunday afternoon than failing at baking carrot bread. The experiment started out with a warning sign of what was to come: my host brother had to re-do the oven's wiring, because when I plugged it in the connection started smoking... not so good. But he was able to fix it, so I plowed ahead anyway. The batter-making phase was full of positive omens: all the ingredients for carrot bread can indeed be found in Cajabamba, and despite some substitutions (e.g., semi-brown sugar instead of white) the dough was still tasty. 

I filled up the bread pan, stuck it in the "oven" and hoped for the best. Sadly, the best did not occur. When I checked the bread after 40 minutes, I found a loaf heavily charred across the top, but still liquid across the bottom. Slightly bummed, I ate the slim middle layer of appropriately cooked bread, and tried to take comfort in the knowledge that I could try again someday in the big wood-burning oven.

As a consequence of this baking misadventure, my next foray into cooking dessert did not involve an oven. Unsurprisingly this second project thus ended much more happily. A cookbook put together by former Peru PCVs had a recipe for "no-bake cookies," so I decided to try them out as a birthday treat for sitemate Jessica. Basically you melt a mixture of butter, sugar, vanilla, evaporated milk, chocolate, peanut butter, and oatmeal in a saucepan, then make cookie shapes and put them in the fridge to cool and harden. Ahh, delicious simplicity :)