Homemade Brown Sugar in Germany

I don’t buy brown sugar in the United States anymore.  It began because I couldn’t find brown sugar in Germany.

Now I suspect one of the biggest uses for brown sugar in the United States is making homemade chocolate chip cookies.  A many of you know, I haven’t had the best of luck giving away chocolate chip cookies to Germans.  But their dislike certainly couldn’t keep me from baking chocolate chip cookies on particularly homesick late nights like this one in May…

If you quickly look up “brown sugar” on wikipedia, you’ll have your substitute for America’s little love bug in the very first sentence:

Brown sugar is a sucrose sugar product with a distinctive brown color due to the presence of molasses. It is either an unrefined or partially refined soft sugar consisting of sugar crystals with some residual molasses content, or it is produced by the addition of molasses to refined white sugar.

Brown sugar = white sugar + molasses.  Well isn’t that easy?  So now I pour white sugar and molasses into my recipes instead of buying brown sugar.  It won’t make me richer any time soon, but it is a little cheaper.  I also don’t have to worry about discovering a brown sugar brick when I go to bake.  (Is there anything worse?!)

Truthfully?  The true reason I keep “making” brown sugar even in the US is that I have one less ingredient to worry about.  I can also keep my recipes consistent wherever I am.

To make your own brown sugar, combine:

1-2 tablespoons of molasses with 1 cup sugar

What’s the difference between “light brown sugar” and “dark brown sugar” at the grocery store?  1 tablespoon or 2 tablespoons of molasses.

So there you have it!  Another handmade trick from our house.  What’s your favorite homemade dessert?  With brown sugar or without?

And while we’re at it, I might as well confess… German chocolate cake is not German at all.