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"Aside from the beer, the rest is just the usual suspects. Flour, eggs, cocoa powder, vanilla, sugar, butter, oh and sour cream, actually, for this one instead of milk. It'll end up with a denser kind of pound cake consistency. Which is good because we'll need it to be sturdy enough for all the added molding chocolate on top. We'll still use a square pan, though. Here, gimme a second."

Max grabs a pad of paper and a pencil and writes out the list of ingredients and quantities in perfect cursive along with basic instructions.

"Take a look at that and get your bearings while I go grab a stout from the office." Max, being somewhat of an alcoholic, has an impressive stash tucked away in the back cabinet in his office. He's kept his promise to Lucas that he wouldn't indulge alone too often, but it makes him feel better to know it's there. And, it does help to have on hand for occasions like this.

"I won't be long."

Edgar has to squint at Max's handwriting; perfect as it is, it's still cursive, and he's much more accustomed to print. A few of the ingredients are easy enough to make out, though, especially since Max has already named them, and he starts hunting around the kitchen to collect them, depositing his finds on the central work table.

By the time Max returns, he's got flour, cocoa, and sugar waiting, and is rummaging for the butter and eggs.

Max sets the beer down triumphantly on the counter next to the rest of the already gathered ingredients. "All right, we're in business. I'll start the oven pre-heating. Think you can handle melting the butter in a saucepan and adding the beer? I'll grab our baking pan and get it greased up while I'm at it."

For Max, delegating tasks in this kitchen just comes naturally by now. But he will be staying nearby to watch just in case Edgar needs a little more coaching.

Finding the saucepan is easy; measuring the butter and beer into it, not much harder, although he has to squint a little bit at the small-print measurement markings. He does have to solicit Max's help for turning on the stove burner and adjusting it to the right amount of heat, but the rest of it is easy.

"Smells a little weird," he informs Max, rummaging through the measuring cups to find the right ones for the sugar and cocoa.

"Yeah," Max chuckles, taking a look at the mix for himself and nodding. "I know it doesn't seem appetizing right at the moment, but you just have to believe in the process. One of my favorite things about cooking is taking all these separate elements that individually wouldn't really taste good, and then with the right combination and preparation, they become greater than their sum. And tastier.

"Looks like it's fully melted now, you can go ahead with the next steps."

Edgar mutters something cheerful about fuckin magic is what it is, as he starts pouring the cocoa and sugar into the butter-and-beer mixture.

"It says 'whisk to blend,'" he reports, squinting at Max's notes. "What's that mean?"

Max laughs hearing that muttering. Honestly, he agrees. It's magic.

"Oh, that means you should use one of these." He lifts a wire whisk up for Edgar. "It helps mix things up evenly. Make sure you only do it until it's all blended smooth. You don't want to overmix it or sometimes the texture can change. Here, let me show you."

Max dips the whisk into the pan and demonstrates the motions with his wrist. He Makes it look so easy.

"Now you try it."

Edgar takes the whisk and the pan, and tries it himself -- a little awkwardly, then with growing confidence.

"Hey, it's working," he reports happily. "What next?"

"There you go," Max cheers him on. "See, I told you. A natural. Might need to look into bumping you up off dishes and into cupcakes if you keep it up." He's not just saying that either. The cafe staff has fluxuated recently, to the point where he could use the extra help.

"Okay, go ahead and turn the heat off on that and let it sit a minute while we mix the rest of our wet ingredients. Eggs, sour cream, and your old friend vanilla. You can use the whisk on those, too, we're about to blend it all together anyway."

He makes a face (good-naturedly) at your old friend vanilla, as he joins Max to start on the next step. Cracking eggs neatly is something he hasn't quite mastered yet; after he crushes the first one into a useless mess and manages to get a clean crack on the second, he backs off to let Max do the next one.

Sour cream is a lot easier, he finds -- just spoon it into the cup measure and then smooth the top off level before dumping it into the mixing bowl.

Yep. That's the face he was hoping to get. Just a little gentle ribbing between friends.

"Don't worry," Max coaches him. Watching the eggs crack messily is slightly painful, but he is careful not to show it. "That skill just takes time and practice. No one masters it overnight." That said, he does crack the last eggs using only one hand into the bowl with quite the level of mastery.

"Okay. Once we get all the wets mixed up. Now it's time to add the dry. Good thing to remember is you generally always want to mix dry into wet, verses the other way around. You wouldn't think so, but it does make a difference."

"Yeah?" Edgar tilts his head sideways, watching Max add the dry ingredients while he stirs. "How come?"

The mixture's starting to resemble goopy mud more than anything else, but it's also actually starting to smell appetizing.

"When you mix it the other way, sometimes that takes longer and you have to mix harder, which changes the texture of the baked product. Basically, if you beat it too hard you start to break it down and add too much air at the same time." He probably should have chosen different wording to explain that, but it's true none-the-less.

"Baking can be a very precise science sometimes. But it looks like we're in good shape here with this batch."

Max reaches for the baking pan, which he has already rubbed down with shortening. "Oh, another tip you want to heed is: always grease the pan before you pour the batter in. If you don't, the cake will stick and it won't come out nicely."

"Right." He nods, trying to commit the advice to memory -- if Max is serious about having him start working on cupcakes, he's going to need to learn all this.

"Now we pour it in, yeah?"

Edited Date: 2022-02-27 03:07 am (UTC)

"That's right," Max says with the air of a proud teacher. "I'll let you do the honors.

"While that bakes in the oven, we can prep for the really fun part: making decorations and frosting. How are you at sculpting?"

"Uh." Edgar looks a little sheepish. "Don't think I ever tried it?"

"Not to worry, we'll start you off with something simple."

Max pulls a tub close to him and pries off the lid. Inside is a tacky white substance which he scoops out and starts to roll between his hands.

"This is modeling chocolate. We can use it to make the parts of the dragon. What color do you think we should make it?"

"White," he says without hesitation, remembering the particularly brave dragonet that perched in Ren's lap that day last month. "Can we do white?"

Max raises his eyebrows not so much in surprise but because he's impressed by the swiftness of that answer.

"Sure, white is easiest of all. We won't have to mix color into this or the frosting if it's white. Here, try rolling this in your hands to get a feel for it." Max offers over the now cylindrical hunk of soft modeling chocolate. "We're going to use that to form some of the smaller detail stuff like the eyes. We'll do the main body of it in buttercream, though. That's what will taste the best."

Edgar takes the modeling chocolate, presses it briefly between his fingers to feel the consistency, lifts it to take a cautious sniff.

"Think we could make wings out of this? Don't think it'd work to make em out of cake."

"That's exactly what we should do," Max tells him with a decisive note of pride. Edgar catches on quick and Max loves him for it.

"We'll probably use it for the tip of the tail too. Now, here's where the sculpting comes in. You want to pull off a chunk of that big piece and then use a rolling pin to flatten it out for a wing. For an eyeball, you'd want to roll it between your palms to get it round instead." Max demonstrates the motion by miming it with his own palms rubbing together.

"When I was a kid, my dad got me a play-dough set which is a lot like this, but you weren't supposed to eat it. Even though it wasn't actually food, I used to love to pretend I was cooking by rolling it out, or tossing it over my head like a pizza chef. Guess you could say I got started young. It's a lot of fun to practice."

He experiments with pulling off a piece about the size of his thumb, and rolling it into a little ball.

"Huh," he says, a little reminiscent. "When I was ... oh, real little, like four or five ... used to like playing around with bits of protein blocks. Lot of the babies did that. You couldn't roll it like this, but you could squeeze it and it'd sort of ... squish, like."

"Just goes to show," Max says, keeping his tone light to mask his inner disgust at what Edgar and all the others on the train had to put up with, "Playing with your food is about as universally human as you can get.

"If I'd ever gotten a chance to have kids, you never would have heard me say 'Don't play with your food.'" Too bad he'll never have the chance.

Edgar laughs. "Oh, we got that all the time. Kids old enough to know better, none of that messing around. Couldn't waste it. You telling me they told kids that even before the train?"

He sets down the little ball of modeling chocolate, and starts on another bit about the same size.

"They sure did," Max said, shaking his head with mirth. "Lots of people used to say 'there's starving kids in Africa' that would gladly eat it if we didn't. Generally. My dad didn't use that one because we were scraping the line of poverty often enough ourselves that we knew better than to waste what we had.

"Don't get me wrong, we never actually went hungry. Dad worked really hard to make sure of it. But it took a lot of juggling to make it happen." The way Max speaks about his dad leaves no room for doubt, he was a good father and he gave Max a happy childhood.

"Might be why I like spoiling people so much now. I want to pass the goodwill on where I can--be the kind of person he'd have wanted me to become, I think. I want to make him proud."

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