My First Baking... Experience...

So far, everything that has been cooked in this apartment has been on the stove, so yesterday, I decided to mix it up a bit. Blake has been begging for a banana cream pie and I was in the mood for chicken garlic pizza, so time to pull in the big guns and use the oven.

First roadblock: there is no such thing as shortening here, only cooking margarine. This comes in a block about twice as big as a normal block of margarine, but is also about as hard as if you froze the block. After stabbing myself with a fork, I successfully managed to scrape enough off for my pie crust.

Second roadblock: nobody here knows what a pastry blender is. I searched high and low in every store that sells cooking utensils with no luck, so out came the fork and a knife. Again, reminding you that the margarine is hard and in nasty clumps. After a little blood, sweat, and tears, my crust was in the pie pan and looked pretty tasty for an uncooked crust.

Third roadblock: the oven. Now first off, everything is in celcius. Not too difficult to look up online to figure out the conversions. However, they don't have a dial that says bake, broil, etc. What is depicted around the dial are little boxes with different pictures. First shows a light bulb, okay-that's for the light. Second shows a fan with two drops of water below. Third shows a fan with a circle around it. Fourth shows triangles coming down from the top of the box. And last, but not least, shows the triangles coming down with the fan. Now I'm not a major in hieroglyphics, so I put it on the last option and crossed my fingers.

After the allotted time I checked on the crust and to my dismay, there were black spots all over the inside of my crust. Luckily most were the upper layer of a bubble so we pulled them off to try and salvage what we could.

By this point in time, I had already finished kneading the pizza crust and was letting it raise (the margarine kneads in much easier when put with the warm water and yeast than the cold water in the pie crust). I had Blake's help to cook the topping ingredients of the pizza, so I put the dough in the pan and made the pizza. Unfortunately I was so distracted by the burn pie crust and worrying about the pizza that I forgot the cheese... On a pizza! How do you forget the cheese?!? We threw the pizza in the oven and Blake said that at his mom's, they always bake on the setting with the fan in the circle, so we tried it on that setting. After about 5 minutes, the top was all golden brown, but it was supposed to take 25 to cook... We pulled it out and indeed, the bottom was still uncooked dough, so it went back in on the lowest rack possible and we went to the computer to look up those darn symbols.

Fourth roadblock: Australians don't believe in baking with their ovens. After searching many sites, we finally found one that showed the correct hieroglyphics with explanations of each. None of the five settings we have on the oven are for baking! The first was the light, second was defrost (? in the oven?), third was constant fanned heat (used most commonly), fourth was static grilling, fifth is grilling. Suddenly a light clicked in Blake's head. His sister makes cakes and other such goodies all the time, but she always puts them on the bottom, with the setting on the fan in a circle, and leaves them in there forever.

The pizza came back out of the oven to avoid completely burning the top and was cooked enough on the bottom to no longer be doughy. To our joy, it tasted just fine (cheese wasn't discovered missing until half-way through the pizza). The filling for the pie is cooked on the stove, so that also turned out fine. A few bites had a slightly toasted crust taste, but overall, the night turned out alright with some pretty good lessons in Aussie baking learned.