The Joy of Cooking Substitution

If you've spent any length of time outside the US and enjoy baking, you've probably mastered the fine art of substitution.  While I generally try to avoid recipes that call for too many substitutions, my height may have been this Thanksgiving when I made a pumpkin pie in a graham cracker crust.  Except, I didn't have any pumpkin.  Or graham crackers for that matter. . .

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day.  The sky was blue, the sun shining through the glass heated my room so much I opened the window, and I had friends coming over in the evening.  It seemed like the perfect day for a spring-time dessert.  I started dreaming about yogurt pie- simple, yummy, and perfect for a warm weather day. And so easy- all I needed was cool whip, yogurt, and a graham cracker crust.  Which is when reality hit.  I have never yet seen cool whip for sale outside the US and as I already mentioned- no graham crackers, let alone pre-made crusts.  But I was determined, and where there's a will there's a way.

Google is basically my best friend when it comes to navigating recipes meant for one country in another.

• Google search:  adding gelatin to home-made whipped cream makes it hold its consistency and it can be substituted for cool-whip.  
• Google translate: gelatin= liivate  
• Google image search: gelatin comes packaged in a container that looks like this (oh, thanks Swedish, I could have identified this without the google translate step.  You never know until you try.)

So, armed and ready, I headed to the grocery store to pick up my gelatin, cream, and yogurt.  Also, some "digestive biscuits" since previous experimenting had lead to the conclusion that this is the best graham cracker substitute. 

Of course, the cooking fun doesn't end there.  Butter here, instead of coming in 4 sticks conveniently marked in tablespoons comes in 500 gram blocks, not so conveniently marked in 50 gram increments.  I was feeling too lazy to pull up the butter conversion website, so I eyeballed it.  The graham cracker crust recipe called for 1/3 cup sugar, which is inconvenient too since I only have a 1/2 cup measuring cup here (randomly included in my set of metric system cups)  More eyeballing, and the crust was good to go.  Then I was on to the cream, which was straight forward, but took ages since a whisk is nowhere near as easy as an electric mixer.

What takes five minutes with a pre-made crust probably took almost an hour to put together here. But it was worth the time, almost too pretty to cut, and rather tasty too.   And I get to add another weapon to my arsenal of secret substitution tricks.