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Dear Community,

The past few weeks I was in Hyderabad (pronounced, 'hy-dra-bad' not 'hy-der-a-bad') India visiting our office there. I was even organized enough to take pictures, which I will post, as soon as I am organized enough to find my camera cord.

But, in the meantime, I thought I would share one of the major lessons I learned while I was there.
Baking without a stand mixer is hard.
While I was visiting, I decided it would be a wonderful idea to make a real "American Treat" for all of my wonderful Indian hosts. At home, this idea of whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies would be relavtively easy. In India, not so much.

I wish I had pictures of this, but they are almost to horrifying to post, so I will just give you some of the highlights.

1) No baking soda. And, even better, try explaining what baking soda is.
2) No oven. I had the brilliant suggestion from my manager to use a microwave. Im guessing she doesn't bake that much. (It should be noted, that an oven was eventually found)
3) No chocolate chips. And then trying to explain why you would want chocolate "chipped".
4) No lables on canisters of white powders in the kitchen.

To save you the grusome details- the baking went down something like this. I chopped up giant chocolate bars to make chips, but because its India, and the oven is on, the chocolate melts and I end the project looking like mud monster from the lagoon. I then confused the salt with the sugar and end up adding 3 cups of salt and 2 teaspoons of sugar. Delicious. I ended the whole thing by filling the entire kitchen with smoke because I left these plastic trays in the oven that the cooks had been storing there. It was amazing. I was a giant sweaty mass of melted chocolate and smoke. Even the next day- post shower, I was discovering cholocate residue in the most unlikely places.

So I had to leave India sans delicious American treat- because it really was more like- "so salty your kidneys may shut down treat" (baked by an incompetant American). I told them the treat was not having to eat the treat.

Many more wonderful stories to follow.

Sarah