It's Not Delivery
Candy Apple’s Cooking Channel
Admiral Biscuit
“Hello everypony!” Waving to a camera was weird, even after all this time.
She’d gotten used to it—she’d gotten used to a lot of things here on Earth. And she did have conversations with her viewers, they were just on a screen and not face-to-face, which was a shame.
“If you’re new here, welcome! Click the like and subscribe and click the bell for notifications—I have to say that or else the robots at YouTube get mad.” Candy Apples wrinkled her muzzle. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she added.
“This is Candy’s Cooking Channel, and today we’re gonna be making a pizza! You humans have so many great kinds of pizzas, it’s very confusing. Not just the variety of toppings: there are thin crust and deep crusts and pan pizzas and Chicago style and stuffed crust—that’s when there’s a ring of cheese at the edge.”
Some YouTube cooking channels had a dedicated kitchen studio, set up for filming. Depending on the channel, it might feature the latest gadgets, or it might be a more average kitchen that anybody might have—if it was a specialty channel, it might have a decidedly antique vibe. She’d learned that Townsend’s kitchen was foreign to most humans, but vaguely familiar to her. Modern homes in Ponyville had standalone stoves, but some of the old farmhouses still used a hearth for cooking.
Candy Apple’s kitchen was what she got when she rented her apartment. It wasn’t as fancy as some, but for a pony coming from a farm where running water was an expensive luxury and hot water was something you made over the fire, it was incredibly fancy.
And incredibly confusing at first, and that had gotten the wheels turning in her head. She could cook on a stove and she could cook in a hearth, but what was a pony to make of a dial that went from 1 to 10, or ‘melt’ to ‘hi’? Especially since there was no flame, just a glowy ring under a glass cover? Not to mention, while many ponies knew how to make food from scratch, how were they to approach the plethora of frozen foods that grocery stores offered?
Thus her YouTube channel was born.
Candy Apple had a tablet perched on the edge of the counter, where she could read comments from her live audience: it was almost like they were there in her kitchen, instead of somewhere out in the world. Sometimes the messages scrolled by so fast she couldn’t read them all, while special messages with money stayed on the screen for a while.
She hadn’t meant to get enough viewers to make money from her channel, she’d just wanted to help ponies out. That didn’t stop her from cashing the checks.
“Fluffaluff wants to know if I’ve heard of Detrot—Detroit pizza? I know about Detroit, it’s a bad Cleveland.” She turned away from the camera, and reached for her fridge. “I don’t know if I’d trust a pizza from there." Then she reconsidered and turned back to the camera. “I forgot to say—since there’s a lot of pizzas you have to decide what you like, what kind of style you want and what kind of toppings you want. Otherwise it’s really overwhelming. And there are different kinds of sauces, too; there’s tomato-based sauce and white sauce, which are like pasta sauces. Also there’s BBQ sauce. That’s an abbreviation for barbeque, which is a way of cooking food over an open fire. If you don’t have an open fire you can kind of get the flavor with the sauce. I think; I haven’t compared. Sometimes dessert pizzas have sugar drizzle instead of sauce, Cici’s makes them—if you’re not sure what kind of pizza you might like you can try Cici’s, they have a pizza buffet with lots of combinations of toppings and sauces.”
She stood up on her hind hooves and opened her freezer, pulling out a box. “This is a DiGiorno’s pizza, it’s spinach, mushroom, and garlic. It has a white sauce and a rising crust.” Candy Apples set it on the counter. “Like a lot of human foods, the box has instructions on it.” She turned it to face the camera. “I’m supposed to leave it in the freezer until the oven is pre-heated to four hundred degrees, or 205 Celsius. But it won’t melt on the counter.
“You can open the ends of the box, that’s the way you’re supposed to get in. But first—” Candy Apples turned to face her stove, and put her hooves on the edge as she reached for the dial. “Make sure your cooktop is cold before putting hooves or hands on it. My stove has a little orange light to tell me if it’s hot, in case I forget.” She swished her tail as she leaned over and twisted the knob. “If you’re cooking a lot of stuff at the same time, it’s smart to plan access to the control panel.”
A notification from her tablet got her attention. “Aww, ElonMuskrat, thanks for the donation! And the question—ElonMuskrat wants to know if it hurts if I put a hoof on the stove. Depends.” She lifted a hoof up for the camera. “The shoe can’t feel anything, and the walls of my hoof aren’t sensitive, but my frog is a little bit.” She picked up a pen with her mouth and tapped her frog. “But I could get my shoe hot and then touch myself somewhere and that would hurt.”
Candy Apples turned back to the stove and used a wooden spoon to push the buttons on the stove. “There we go, now we have to wait for the oven to warm up, so I’m going to open up the pizza and show you what you’re going to get.”
She used a knife in her teeth to slit the end of the package open and dumped the pizza out on the counter, then angled the camera down. “It comes wrapped in plastic, to keep all the toppings on. Sometimes there’s a spot where you can pull the plastic apart, other times you have to cut it off. They usually come on cardboard discs but not always, and sometimes they come in pans that you’re supposed to cook them in. It’ll tell you in the instructions on the box.
“Depending on what kind of pizza you got and how well-frozen it was, the toppings might have slid off. My grocery store likes packing them on end, and if I don’t get them home fast enough a lot of the toppings slide to one edge of the pizza. You can just push them back where they should be—there’s a picture on the box if you’re not sure.”
Her notification bell chimed again. “Thanks for the donation, sixties-spiderman. ‘Do we have pizzas in Equestria?’ Yes, a lot of different varieties, although they don’t go by that name. Various kinds of flatbreads with other ingredients baked in or put on top. A lot of ponies don’t like tomato sauce, and some tribes don’t like cheese.
“Now the instructions in the box say to put the pizza directly on the center rack, which is what we’re going to do. A lot of ovens have moveable racks, which you’ll want to have done before you preheat the oven. But you can also put the pizza on—bigbuffetboy85 wants to know why some tribes don’t like cheese. I don’t know, I like cheese. I think they’re wrong . . . but I wouldn’t eat a fish and a pegasus would.”
Candy Apple’s ears perked as the oven timer beeped. “There it is, all pre-heated. Make sure you remember to take the plastic off, and that the oven’s hot. I’ve got an oven paddle—humans sell them as pizza paddles, but they work for putting all sorts of things in the oven and pulling it back out again.
“Or, I could use my oven rack hook—you can have a craftsmare make one, or you can buy them on Amazon.” She turned around and opened a cabinet drawer, then pulled out a wooden hook and turned her head to show it to the camera.
“I like to always have a towel draped over my oven door pipe; it’s a reminder to wipe your hooves and muzzle, and also useful for pulling the door open.” She tugged the door down, remembered to re-aim the camera, then pulled the wire rack out with the tool.
Candy Apples set the pizza on the rack, then pushed it back in with the toe of her shoe. “Don’t do this if you’re a human.” She pushed the door back shut and turned to face the camera again. “Remember that the box says you’re supposed to cook it for twenty four to twenty seven minutes. Your oven should have a timer on it, or you can set one on your microwave or on your telephone—I’ve got one that sticks to the door of my electric icebox that’s easy to use.” She turned to her refrigerator door and dialed it to the correct time.
“Now while we wait for the pizza to cook, I should talk a little bit about my sponsor!” Candy Apples picked up a cue card. “Have you ever wanted to be nobility? With Established Titles, you can be! Scottish law has a rule that anypony—anybody—who owns land on a Scottish estate gets to be called a Lord or Lady. You can buy it for yourself or for a family member or a loved one. Some of the proceeds will be used to plant trees, and you’ll get a certificate describing your land. I’ve got one—hold on.” Candy Apples turned tail and headed out of the kitchen; a moment later the camera recorded a few bumps and bangs from the living room, and then she was back, proudly holding a framed certificate. “Like this. And you’ll get a discount if you use my promotional code, ‘CandyCC.’ It doesn’t say here if you’re allowed to visit your land or do anything with it, but I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”
Candy Apples set the framed certificate down on her countertop. “You humans have weird customs. If just owning land made you a noble, nearly all earth ponies would be. Back home we only get nobility if we’re born into it or gifted it by another noble . . . or if we become an alicorn.”
She turned her attention back to her feed. “Thanks for the donation, Vivzie! Vivzie wants to know how you become an alicorn? We only know of two times it’s happened; Princess Twilight Sparkle did a very difficult spell and saved Equestria, and that’s how she became an alicorn. We don’t know what Princess Cadance did, nopony has ever said. And Flurry Heart was born an alicorn.
“GPT44Xbot, I don’t think that the Princesses can bestow wings and horns on a pony . . . I don’t know, though, maybe they can. I think it would be very strange to suddenly be an alicorn. There are spells to make butterfly wings or to turn a pony into a breezie.”
Candy Apples leaned in to the screen, trying to catch some more messages scrolling by. Just then, her notification rang again. “PILF_Hunter, you want to see my oven rack tool again? Hold on.” She turned around and opened the drawer again, pulling it out before turning back to face the camera. “It’s not anything too fancy, just a piece of hardwood I commissioned a craftsmare to make for me. You want the handle to be comfortable in the mouth or in your hands, and of course the hook has to be able to grab the rack.” She turned around again to put it away, then checked the timer on the fridge. “Only a couple minutes left until it’s done—I’ve found that my oven usually cooks faster, so I’ll want to take it out at twenty four minutes.
“Who does the braids and bows in my mane, Impetus? I do, it’s not hard when you know how. The bows just clip in.” She lifted up a braid with her hoof and unclipped a yellow bow. “That keeps everything in place, and they’ll just pull out if I get my mane caught in something—you never know when you’re working on a farm.”
“Now’s a good time to remember a cooling rack. My oven has a little compartment at the bottom where I can keep them.” Candy Apples turned around and bent down to slide open the drawer. “All sorts of little trays fit down there.” There was some rummaging and metal clattering before she popped her head back up, a wire rack in her mouth.
“A baking tray or a pizza stone might be a better choice, but I don’t have one that the pizza will fit. Or a wooden cutting board.” Her ears turned as the kitchen timer started ringing. “Ooh, pizza’s done, I can’t wait to see what it looks like.”
She pulled the oven door open and held the cooling rack under the oven rack. “You can slide the pizza out with a hoof or a utensil, be careful of your balance. You don’t want to tip the pizza over.”
Candy Apples turned and presented her DiGiorno pizza to the camera—sort of to the camera. Only one corner was visible until she angled the camera down again, then set her hooves proudly on the countertop.
“It’s gotta cool for five minutes before you can eat it,” she said. “But it smells so good, and the crust looks nice. All the cheese is melted . . . I don’t know if I should cut it before it cools or after it does.” She turned to get her pizza cutter and poked the pizza with it experimentally. “Probably after, the cheese is too soft right now. I’ll have to set on something other than the wire rack, too.
“I should probably set my timer again.” Candy Apples turned and put five minutes on her timer. “There we go. Verplichtend wants to know if I’ve ever had a pizza from a real pizzaria—yes, I’ve ordered pizzas for delivery to my apartment and I’ve gone to pizza restaurants.” She looked back at the screen as a new comment came in. “No, MintyLovesSocks, I’m not going to rank them; everypony has different tastes.” She turned around and rummaged under her oven, then turned around with a baking sheet in her mouth.
She held it over the pizza, estimating its size. “That’s too small . . . I don’t have a big enough cutting board.” A ping from her tablet got her attention. “Uh . . . use the pizza box?” She looked back at the counter, where the empty pizza box still sat. “That’s a great idea, Yesterdaisy.”
Candy Apples grabbed the empty pizza box just as the timer rang. She slid the pizza onto the box, rolling the pizza cutter through it and making eight neat slices. “The box says that I should cut it into six slices . . . some pizzas say they should be cut into five slices—you don’t have to follow those instructions, you can make as many pieces as you like.” She picked up a slice and held it up to the camera. “Let’s try it.”
She took two bites before setting the slice back down on the box. “Delicious . . . I think it could have used another minute or so in the oven. Or maybe the toppings are too wet, sometimes it’s hard to get the right texture with wet foods. Well, that’s it for today! Thanks for the donations, thanks to everypony for watching, and come by next week when we’re gonna cook Hot Pockets!”
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Oh, she gonna get emails.
What kind of sadistic freak goes around instructing people to slice a pizza in fifths?
This is adorable and also funny at the same time.
We need more stories with the Admiral Biscuit approach.
Hot Pockets?
Wasnt there something about Princess Twilight having to lay down the law about those things when Pinkie and Dash went to town on them?
Eventually Pones are gonna pick up on the dumber naming conventions, and YouTube is shortly going to be blocking a whole load of totally normal pone channels.
11628816
And cutting into squares isn't "Party Slice." That's fuckin Minnesota-style.
https://thetakeout.com/what-the-uff-is-minnesota-style-pizza-1821303150
Oh dear. I hope she doesn't run into the problem Shiroi did...
The proper term is a peel.
Also, a pizza stone is vastly superior to a metal oven pan or putting directly on the oven rack. Using a pizza stone on the charcoal grill gets you the best of all worlds. Though properly seasoning the stone can be a pain. If it isn't seasoned enough and crust gets burned on, you can't use a chain scrubber to clean it off like you would with cast iron.
Also, using a Dutch Oven in a charcoal grill is brilliant. Almost makes up for the inevitable fart jokes.
11628833
Given that I saw this story because Biscuit added it to the "Pipp Streams Lewd" group...
11628861
!!
Posted to
Admiral Biscuit's Fleet
Ponies On Earth folder
I used to read the Rabbi Small mysteries (Kemmelman) so I wondered "Is pizza kosher?".
Short answer: No.
1) You can't mix meat & dairy (I knew that) but even vegetarian or vegan pizza has problems.
2) Apparently, a kitchen has to be inspected & certified kosher by a Rabbi.
This is a TOTAL pain. You need separate dishes & utensils for meat & dairy dishes, just one employee using the wrong dish cancels the rating & that's just the start.
Plus, a Jew has to take part in making the dish otherwise it isn't kosher. (This depends. Orthodox Jews are strictest about this.) Since asking your employees if they are Jewish is illegal in the USA, there are obvious problems.
Plus, all Jews cannot eat leavened bread during Passover, so even a plain cheese pizza is Right Out.
Pilf Hunter… I both chuckled and shook my head at this.
THAT sponsor has been proven a scam. (Which is why you don't see them anymore except on YT vids they sponsored before everyone realized they were a scam. Some channels even went so far as to remove those vids and then repost them without the sponsor message.)
For those of you that have not see the Townsends:
https://www.youtube.com/@townsends/videos
11629019
My Lutheran church has annual Seder meals.
"Christian Seders" are a legitimate thing, except when idiots pull stunts like leavened challah.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/christian-passover-seder-with-cross-shaped-challah-sparks-online-rage/
You'd think people would have caught the annual Ten Commandments broadcast on TV at least once and know better.
there's always one
This is just too wholesomely adorable.
And with the thoughts on wood stoves and no water heater, I started to ponder Amish ponies...
11629091
Even the most newfangled 'molecular gastronomy' gimmicks can't beat wood or charcoal-fired pizza.
11629135
True, though good enough is good enough when you don't have time to set up a wood- or charcoal-fired oven.
Candy...you are SOOO sweet and adorable...but you're getting scammed, sweetie. That..."sponsor" of yours? It's a totally bogus operation, and they only got you to use them because they knew you were new to Earth and were too naïve to check them out. YouTube should have warned her.
11629138
Like I said earlier, a charcoal grill and pizza stone work fine. Though a thermometer is good to have to keep it at around 400°. If the grill doesn't have one built in, I don't know how accurate standalone ambient grill thermometers are.
11629091
If you look at the episodes with the Pie family farm, it is my head canon that they are Manenites.
Or, they could just be going for a Little House On The Prairie look. The show doesn't say.
"This video was brought to you by RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS!"
11628810
And probably overwhelming to a pony. So many choices.
11628816
She's not wrong.
11628822
AFAIK, none of the frozen pizza companies tell you how many slices to cut a pizza into. However, I've seen frozen pizza where the nutrition information is "per 1/5 pizza." (I've seen 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, and 'whole pizza')
11628825
Thank you!
11629316
Bah, what would they even know!? That's class! 😎 But class enough for so many delicious choices. 😋
11628828
If anypony in Equestria was gonna get into Hot Pockets, it'd be those two.
They might, or they might not. I don't know what YouTube's rules are on usernames, if we're being honest.
11628830
Detroit style's cut into squares, too. But we make our pizzas rectangular, so it's more logical to have squares.
11628833
Depends on what YouTube's rules are.
11628850
Yes it is. I don't know if it's called that if it's a similar tool for other purposes (bread, for example).
I don't know if it would make an appreciable difference for frozen pizzas. I've never bought a stone but I did buy an oven pan that was supposedly for making pizzas on and never use it 'cause it doesn't make any difference that I've been able to notice.
That's something I've cooked in before, back in Boy Scouts.
11628861
It seemed appropriate. Especially since Ponly Fans was what inspired me to write it.
11628911
She's dressed like everypony else in Ponyville; humans have different morals.
11628980
Thanks!
I think you can if you're careful with ingredients (for example, no meat).
I think you can if it's applicable for the specific job--for example, I would imagine that you can ask a priest or pastor you're thinking of hiring if they have an appropriate divinity degree and if they are a member of the religion in question. Or in the case of preparing kosher/halal food, if they hold whatever appropriate knowledge (religious or otherwise) is required for the job.
In theory, you could make a pizza with unleavened bread, although I don't know how good it would be. There are non-yeast pizza dough recipes, as well as non-gluten ones (some of which would be unleavened AFAIK; I don't think you put yeast in a cauliflower crust, for example).
11629023
Honestly, there's probably somebody who already has this username.
11629039
They say that they're not; regardless, there was a period of time where they were sponsoring a lot of videos, and I was gonna use them in a story that I never wound up writing, so this seemed like a good place to put them in.
Honestly, having a certificate that says you're a lord or lady has no real value in the world; certainly you're not gonna get put into whatever the British or Scottish book of Nobles is just 'cause you bought a square of land in Dunfermline. At least Candy Apples isn't really making false promises; she recognizes that you can't just become noble by getting land.
Edit: Also, Townsends is the nicest man on the internet. In terms of cooking channels, Candy Apples might give him some competition (and I think the two of them would really hit it off.)
11629065
One of the churches I used to attend did a proper Passover meal and IIRC everything was approved by and explained by a Rabbi.
I've also attended a Hindu wedding where the Priest explained some of the rituals for non-Hindus; that was really cool.
11629072
Guarantee she's got more than that one as a viewer, maybe with names that aren't quite as on the nose.
11629091
Thank you!
I've long wanted to write a fic with a working class or farmpony on Earth working with the Amish or the Mennonites and it being just like it was back in Equestria. The only reason I haven't is that I don't know enough about Amish or Mennonites to do it justice, and it's hard to find a genuine Amish or Mennonite person online.
If I had more free time, I'd totally head out to one of the Amish farms around me and do an in-person interview.
EDIT: maybe next time I have the free time to visit a draft horse show; there tend to be a lot of Amish/Mennonites there.
11629140
If they pay her for the ad, she's not the one getting scammed. (Well, she did if she bought the certificate; on the other hand, she also knows that she doesn't become noble just by having that.)
It is a kind of dated reference at time of posting, but it's also a company I don't feel bad making fun of, and anybody who's been on YouTube over the last year has surely heard a YouTuber who's been sponsored by them.
11629155
Like, they're a little behind the times, but in my vision of Equestria, they're not that behind the times. Most of my fics assume that the tech level in Equestira is roughly 1870s.
And here's another thing; we learned from the Zap Apple Jam episode that the rituals are important for making it, so maybe there are important rituals involved in rock farming, too.
11629192
Yup, that's the reference I was going for
11629240
I was thinking of Hello Fresh and her having trouble figuring out the ingredients . . . that might happen in another story.
I don't feel that Candy Apples would be a good match for RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS. She doesn't seem like the kind of pony who would enjoy a video game.
11629321
There comes a point where there's just too many choices. I think there was a study done on pasta sauce and how many different kinds was a good number . . . I feel like it was a very low number, and of course the pasta sauce companies paid it no mind and now you can get like a billion different kinds.
Domino's started making more money when they dropped the number of menu items and the number of toppings. They even figured out (back in the day) that only offering one size of pizza made it easier for their customers and better for their bottom line.
11629357
The folks at Raid Shadow Legends don't seem to care--they seem to try to get anybody they can to promote the darn game, even if the channel has squat to do with gaming or the youtuber much of a gamer. It's why it's so annoyingly common as a sponsor. So I guarantee you they'll still try and ask her regardless. Whether or not she accepts is another story, but she seems like the sort who'd at least consider it, just to be polite. And a sponsor is still a sponsor, after all.
That said, Hello Fresh does seem like a perfect sponsor for her. And a good product, from what I hear--I've actually been tempted to try it a couple times myself.
11629353
Yeah...my daughter bought me one of those three years ago for Christmas. It's still on my wall, but at least I didn't go change my credit cards or checking accounts to read, "Lord Mark..."
11629355
Well, the Menonites date back to the 17th century, that's about a century before the Revolutionary War.
Per Wikipedia, Little House On The Prairie was set 1870-1894. That's behind Manehatten, at least.