Grocery Shopping

My church is hosting a bazaar tomorrow afternoon, and I decided to do an impromptu bake sale. Because, I mean, who doesn't need a little extra cash for Christmas?

So today, with the promise of an all day power outage (which, btw, hasn't even started yet, at 11:30 AM), I will be baking German chocolate brownies, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, white cupcakes with homemade frosting and sprinkles, vanilla coconut muffins, and a lemon cake.

Naturally, I don't have all of the necessary ingredients on hand. So I went grocery shopping this morning. I still find myself chuckling internally about what a grand adventure grocery shopping is. I had to make four different stops. Just for baking ingredients.

1. At the first stop, I bought brown sugar. It's the only store I've ever found in all of Indonesia that sells REAL brown sugar (as opposed to palm sugar which I don't like), and thankfully it's right here in my town. This was the only item I bought at this overpriced import store (which is run out of the front of someone's house).

2. From there, I went to the new baking goods store that just opened up a month or two ago. And thank goodness for them, otherwise this list would be a lot longer! I did the bulk of my shopping here - flour, sugar, cocoa, oatmeal, milk, etc. They sell ingredients by the kilo at only a 15 - 20 cent increase in price over the distributor. I could go crazy shopping there. But I limited myself to only what I needed for baking today.

3. Next, I needed a lemon for the lemon cake. Fresh fruit is sold all the way across town from the first two stores. I also happened to find ground ginger at this store, which I don't need for today, but I've been out of it and looking for it for quite awhile now.

4. And last but not least, I needed eggs, which NONE of the other stores had. So I ran to a tiny little ma and pa shop near my house. Supporting local business and all, you know. I picked up half a kilo of eggs (they're sold by the kilo, not the dozen here), and headed home just in time to miss the rain.

Now to start baking and hope I make a little bit of profit off this whole adventure!