It might sound easy. You probably think: surely you just go to the store, buy the ingredients, mix them up, and bake them. It is not Mars! Except, it kind of is.

First, let’s start with buying the ingredients. I know them by heart. You have vanilla, eggs, salted butter, both kinds of sugar, flour, chocolate chips, salt, and baking powder, or soda? That part I can’t remember, so I look it up. It’s both. I make my list and head to the nearby grocery store with the largest baking section, although, no surprise, it is about one-sixth the size of the baking sections in grocery stores in the United States. But that should make it easier, right? I head to the correct aisle and warn Serhii, knowing from previous experience that it will take a while. Salt, vanilla, and eggs are the only things I don’t need to find.

I start with flour, phone with Google Translate ready to go in hand. After all, everything is in Norwegain in a Norwegain grocery store.

White flour is called hvete-mel. There are only two options. I wonder if one is the finer bread flour. Picking my battles, I choose the økologisk (organic) option, and call it good. It is not like you have to be exact in baking. Next, sugar. This one could be easier. I am already familiar with sugar being called sukker in Norwegain. Except last time I needed to buy regular granulated sugar, I ended up with powdered sugar instead. I recognize the box I bought by mistake last time and pick the other one. But I don’t see brown sugar anywhere, so I pull out my phone and Google: Does brown sugar exist in Norway? Brown sugar does not exist in Norway. So I look up: How do you make brown sugar? Turns out that it is just white sugar mixed with molasses. Do they have molasses in Norway? Yes, they have molasses in Norway, but it is called mørk sirup (dark syrup). Makes sense.

I locate the mørk sirup and move on to the baking powder called bake pulver. Then to baking soda or ruokasooda. I am relieved to find that as well, but I don’t have so much luck with the salted butter. They are sold out of the one non-lactose-free salted butter option in the store. I surmise that if I can make brown sugar, surely, I can make salted butter as well.

On to the chocolate chips, which I see nowhere. Finally, I locate tiny bags of tiny chocolate chips that are 50 kroner ($5/each). Realizing I would need about three of them, I opt to crunch up full chocolate bars instead, which ends up saving me zero money.

Now for the baking. Feeling smart, I Google: chocolate chip cookie recipe using the metric system. One pops up, but it is unhelpfully in grams, which I would need a scale for. I also have zero measuring spoons in the house, but I do have teaspoon and tablespoon-sized spoons, and dry and liquid measuring cups, which utilize milliliters. Out comes my phone again, ready to convert cups to milliliters.

The translation is rocky. One cup equals 236.588 milliliters. Guessing as best I can, I make due, holding these obscure numbers in my head for longer than I want to. The whole affair makes my brain hurt and I wonder if it would have been easier to find a Norwegain recipe (if one exists), having to translate the words instead of covert the measurements. But it is too late now, plus I only have one more conversion to make: ferienheit to celcuis.

You can judge for yourself how they turned out, but I can tell you, they sure tasted great!