My family has always been very dessert oriented. So, when we moved to Costa Rica in 2014 to start the life of an overseas missionary family, we thought, what better way to celebrate than to turn on the oven and bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies?

So there I was, searching through our freshly stocked cupboards and practicing the few Spanish words that I knew in my head as I went along. I needed huevos (eggs) not jueves (Thursday) and harina (flour) instead of gallina (a hen). (I remember we eventually labeled our entire house to help us learn Spanish more quickly). Finally, I mixed in the chocolate chips to finish.

This is when mom and I realized we hadn’t used the oven yet. So there we were, standing next to our small tico oven, compared to our giant ovens in the United States, wondering why it only went up to 250°F when we needed 350°F. Minor setback! We would just bake the cookies longer. So we proceeded to put the cookies in the oven and wait until the smell of freshly baked goodness wafted through the house.

The timer went off about 12 minutes later, the normal time we would bake this recipe, and we went to check on them. I opened the oven just in time to witness the cookies in the middle of the tray burning and the cookies surrounding those slightly less burned. What happened?! The oven must not work right, it doesn’t cook/bake evenly. That was our first conclusion. Or perhaps the elevation is different here and we should have changed the measurements of the ingredients slightly.

As I started to google failed cookie baking mistakes in different countries, my mom realized exactly what the problem was. The oven was in Celsius! The 250°F (or so we thought at the time) was actually 482°F! No wonder half our cookies burned and the other half burned even worse!

This was only one of the hundreds of mistakes we made upon moving into a whole different culture, but it will always be the first one that I think of when I think of our transition into Costa Rica.

Meghan Sherwood, MK from Panama