making friends....

That is half of me on the far right of the picture

I had a wonderful time with the Parker, Colorado Cooking Divas club this evening and will look forward to their next event:) They were all so welcoming and fascinated with me being from Australia. Thank goodness for the GPS though, because the venue was in the middle of nowhere and it was dark, so I would never have found it without technology! Matt and Brett are enjoying some of the cookies I got in the swap as dessert. The remaining cookies are going to a charity, which is an additional bonus to an evening well spent.

Some of the interesting cookies were:

• choc chip with bacon  (just plain weird)
• choc chip with pumpkin (again just plain weird)
• divinity (sort of like meringue but better, I will google that recipe!)
• peanut butter fudge

My favourite was the divinity and it looked so Christmasy! 


 In an effort to meet new people I am going to a cooking club tonight. There will be about 30 women all from the area in which we are house hunting at the moment. Tonight's event is a cookie swap. Each woman brings 6 dozen cookies and we take some of each home with us to try. But mostly the event is about socializing and meeting new people. It could be fun or awful but I am game, so I will give it a try.

These are the American ingredients that I had to buy to cook my Aussie recipes.  I am making gingerbread, shortbread and Anzac biscuits.
I couldn't get:

• arrowroot for the shortbread, so the substitute ingredient is cornstarch and vanilla.
• golden syrup, so the substitute is dark corn syrup (think I'll try molasses next time)
• the coconut here is pre-sweetened so I had to use less sugar in the recipes with coconut

Even bicarb soda is called baking soda and plain flour is called all purpose flour so there was a lot of label reading required when we bought the ingredients!

Butter comes in a box, with 4 sticks inside - handy actually!

Not one familiar brand

The sweetened coconut

The dough is ready to cook (Anzacs)

4 trays cooked and a full oven - getting there

Cooling on the bench

In the platter at last!!!!

 6 Dozen cookies!!!!

 So the cooking is done, the RSVP is sent, I am nervous about meeting 30 new people but I've had fun already just getting ready for this evening. Now lets just hope the GPS can find the venue....