Submission (#3661) Approved

Wordcount: 428
Characters: Yuzu ELN1587; Pomona ELN1525 (mentioned)
Region: Bellmoril technically because that's where Yuzu lives.
Food: Epplernut butter cookies, with faerie-shroud flour (from Faerindell). I'm cool about features.

Yuzu smiles to herself, cheery and sure as she checks and double-checks the recipe book. Yes, she’s got this right, perfectly right, eggs and milk and nutmeg and ginger and shroud flour and epplernut butter. She’s going to make the best cookies Pomona’s ever eaten. Usually Pom cooks, but she needs a rest as it is and Yuzu loves learning things if it means helping her friends out. She’s never tried this recipe before, but she found it in the library and it sounds so good. The shroud flour will turn the cookies pink-purple, and the epplernut butter will make sure they’re the tastiest things around.

She’s sure, and she finishes up rolling the dough into balls on the cooking sheet, and pushes it into the stove. It’s a heavy thing commissioned by her parents, all brick and burning with magic, but it will cook everything at just the right temperature, and she knows it’ll be perfect. Cooking may not be her best skill, but Pomona deserves cookies, and epplernut butter is harder to find than she thought it would be.

The cookies take an hour to bake, and they fill the kitchen with a heavenly smell. Yuzu’s glad her siblings are all out of the house, lest they reach into the oven with their paws while she’s studying a magazine and steal all of Pomona’s cookies on her. If they do that, she has to remake them, and she isn’t quite that confident in her cooking skills. But they’re done soon enough, and she opens the door to the oven to pull out her cookies.

When she places them on the table to take a look, she blinks several times in confused horror. They’re black! Not gray or brown or golden or singed, they’re pomu-fur black! Ebony and charcoal and burnt-black!

She reaches for the recipe book and scans its contents again. Panicking, she skims pages right to the back, where it explains common mistakes. “Finished food is black but does not smell burnt: contains epplernut butter, taste test to ensure that food is just black-coloured, and not burnt.”

She waits twenty minutes for the cookies to cool enough to test, and she paces the entire time. What if she got it wrong? What if they’re burnt after all?

Yuzu can stand it no longer after fifteen minutes, and reaches for a cookie. It’s hot, and tempted to melt right back into dough, but she takes a bite anyway. It’s sweet, and perfect, and tastes like proper epplernut butter cookies.

Oh, Pomona is going to love this.