There are no chocolate chips in South Africa.

Today was a lazy Sunday. While many people wrote papers and read for school, I was lucky enough to not have much homework and struggled to keep myself busy.

I haven’t baked once since I’ve been here, because I was worried that our kitchen did not have all the necessary baking materials and converting measurements could make something taste horriblily. Despite all of this, my friend/housemate KK and I decided to use our wide-open day and bake chocolate chip cookies.

KK and I asked Martina, my RA, where we could find chocolate chips and after giving us a very confused look, she asked what we would do with chocolate chips. I told her we wanted to make cookies and she said she (obviously) buys a chocolate bar, freezes it, then smashes it into little pieces, and that is exactly what KK and I did. I found a recipe I had used once before for classic chocolate chip cookies on the Cadbury website, since Cadbury is absolutely everywhere here, which I love!

When I went to the grocery store in the morning, I looked for chocolate chips on the baking aisle, but the only package I found that was labeled chocolate chips looked more like chocolate shavings and certainly was not enough for even one batch of cookies. I thought it was just Checkers that didn’t sell chocolate chips, but turns out there are no chocolate chips at Pick ‘n Pay, Woolworth’s, Clicks, or all of South Africa.

We finally gave up on trying to find not only chocolate chips, but also a cookie pan. The only pan we found cost R70 (about $10 USD), was poorly made and only big enough for about six or eight cookies. We decided that these cookies would just be a creative experiment where we made use of what we could find in the kitchen.

We were determined to make delicious chocolate chip cookies, particularly because we haven’t enjoyed any since arriving in South Africa. We started by mixing the basic cookies ingredients as we chilled the Cadbury dark chocolate bar in the freezer as Martina advised.

Once the chocolate was hardened, I grabbed a meat mallet and a spatula. KK and I split up the 180g chocolate bar into two baggies, then she picked up the mallet and I had the spatula. From there, we went crazy, smacking the little bags of chocolate on the kitchen table for about 20 minutes straight making very loud noises until all of the chocolate was chopped into small pieces.

Since we didn’t have a cookie pan, we improvised by using a glass lasagna pan and pie dish, which allowed us to bake 10 cookies per batch. Three batches later and all of the cookies were baked and simultaneously eaten by everyone in the house. They were delicious and we will definitely be making them again soon! My goal is to be able to make chocolate chips from a whole chocolate bar in less than five minutes by the end of the semester.

Click here for the Cadbury Classic Chocolate Chip recipe! Note: the recipe calls for milk chocolate chips, but we used dark chocolate and the cookies turned were perfectly sweet.

One of our batches of chocolate chips minutes before disappearing into people's stomachs.