When my family arrived in Ireland, we were excited to get settled in. As with any move, one of the first things we needed to do was find a grocery store. I love to bake and immediately noticed some stark differences. I could find caster sugar everywhere very easily.  What the heck is caster sugar you ask??  Very, very fine sugar, but not quite powdered.  Enough of a difference to tweak the outcomes of virtually every recipe from the granulated sugar I use in the States.  But flour, surely flour would be the same, right?  Uhm, no.  I looked for flour here and had no idea what to buy. There was strong flour, cream flour and plain flour.  I knew enough to stay away from the self-rising flour option, but it took some reading and experimenting to figure out what I’d need and want.  Chocolate chips at regular grocery stores come in teeny tiny bags here. Who only needs a handful of chocolate chips at once?  Seriously??  It’s CHOCOLATE. Thank goodness for Musgraves which is somewhat similar to Costco stateside!  A big, 2 kilo bag of Callebaut chips is a lifesaver (literally??!!).

My kids started school and also have adjusted to the differences of life in Ireland. A couple of months into the school year, my daughter asked if she could invite over some friends from school for a party. We picked a date and 8 teenage girls headed over to our house for a fun Friday night. Now, I have 3 kids and I know that it can be loud sometimes but Wow! Nine girls all dancing, singing and talking is a whole new level! They had a great time.

For fun the girls planned a bake off. They divided themselves into 2 teams. Each team made a dessert and then they judged who had the better one. My daughter told me they wanted to make brownies and chocolate chip cookies. Without thinking much about it I printed off two recipes that I knew were good. I, of course, just went to my American recipes that I’ve used time and time again without thinking about the conversions and differences in recipes from the U.S. to Ireland. I was focused on shopping to make dinner for 8 extra people and figuring out what my other two kids would be doing. I didn’t stop and think that maybe I should have used recipes from Ireland.

The big night arrived and the girls started showing up. Once everyone was accounted for they made their way into the kitchen. There was a team of 4 and a team of 5. I have plenty of baking supplies and I had laid them out on the counter with bowls and mixers and measuring cups and spoons. I put the ingredients needed all together on a counter. Immediately one of the girls said, “Why is this recipe not in grams?” Hmmm, a little twinge of panic struck as I realized that most of the girls in my kitchen had probably never seen an American recipe. The metric system strikes again!*  Thankfully, I have a little conversion chart that I made and hung next to the oven for Celsius to Fahrenheit conversions. We dodged that bullet!

I started moving back and forth between the two groups. With 8 hands all moving and working on one side of the kitchen and 10 on the other, plus all the talking that goes along with a get together, it was impossible to keep up. The recipes in Ireland don’t use 1/4 cup or 2 cups for liquid measurements. They use ml. The dry ingredients are measured in grams and not by cups or ounces. Before I knew what was happening one of the groups had put 3 full cups of brown sugar and 3 full cups of granulated sugar along with the appropriate amount of butter (1/2 cup) into a big mixing bowl. They were having trouble trying to mix it. I asked if they had measured the sugar. They had not realized that it was 3/4 cups of each and they needed to use the small 1/4 cup 3 times. I hadn’t considered how different the measuring cups are here. If you’ve ever baked, you know that 6 cups of sugar with a 1/2 cup of butter leads to…..disaster!  So, we started over with that recipe!

On the other side I heard someone ask why the flour didn’t have any bicarbonate soda already in it. I had to smile. She had no idea that it took me lots of time and stores to find flour without any leavening added. I have only found two supermarkets that sell flour without leavening added. Even if the flour doesn’t say self rising flour, there is almost always baking soda or powder in it. It was a little chaotic, a lot noisy but even more fun! Both desserts turned out well in the end and both were polished off by the end of the night.

Living abroad is an adventure. It is funny how something as simple as a get together for kids can be so different in some ways and yet so much the same in the joy and fun!

*Full disclosure, I am a fan of the metric system.  Everything just….converts….so much easier!