>Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly.
True, but I can still make far superior chocolate-chip cookies (an American staple pastry) at home, for cheap, than I've ever had from 90% of stores and bakeries.
Try out the following recipe with the addition of half a lemon's juice, switching out all the sugar for brown sugar. You can either use the full load of chocolate chips, or substitute dark chocolate, or do like I do and half the chocolates so you can enjoy the cookie.
After reading enough American news I can only joke that they are afraid that the ownership of marginally precise scales would automatically summon a police drug raid against them.
They are not uncommon, I have an electronic metric/imperial scale (they are sold in most home appliances shops). I prefer just scooping quantities out over weighing.
In any case lots of times, after you get to know the recipe, you just eyeball the proportions. No need to be super precise in most instances. We're not making alloys.
True, but I can still make far superior chocolate-chip cookies (an American staple pastry) at home, for cheap, than I've ever had from 90% of stores and bakeries.
Try out the following recipe with the addition of half a lemon's juice, switching out all the sugar for brown sugar. You can either use the full load of chocolate chips, or substitute dark chocolate, or do like I do and half the chocolates so you can enjoy the cookie.
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cooki...
(Mind, I might be an edge-case, since I've practiced baking since I was five years old.)