"Okay, running through the check list. Flour?" Rainbow looked up from the tattered cookbook and blew the fringe out of his eyes. It took him a couple of attempts.
I tapped my hoof on every other thing on the countertop until I found the bag of white powder. "Check!"
His eyes lingered on me with a smirk. "Eggs?"
"Yes." There was still a white feather in my hair from the morning.
"Milk?"
"It's probably still fine."
"We're baking it, it should be okay. Butter?"
"Also here."
"Sugar?"
"Yep!"
"And fruit."
I span the can in the air once, before catching it on a hoof. "Best before August 22nd!"
"What year?" He let the book slap on the counter.
"It's probably fine."
He gave me a sceptical quirk of the eyebrow. "Probably. So, first we set the oven to... Gas Mark 3."
"Oh, you mean we don't just fry it?"
"No, Atom, that's not how you bake a cake."
I shrugged, and gave the rusted old fire hazard a slap. It needed it to get running. The owners of my old house were still nowhere to be found, so I'm sure they wouldn't mind if we borrowed their kitchen for the afternoon to get a bit sentimental with mum's old recipe book. It looked like the oven hadn't been used since I was in the place either. "That's firing up now."
"Okay, next we grease the..." Rainbow squinted at the book. "Mum, your writing is terrible... I think it's meant to say 'grease the tin with butter' but it looks like 'grease the un wa buur'."
"I can tell this is already going great."
"You do that, I'll... 'weigh the fruit into a bowl?' We know how much fruit we have..." He scrunched his nose up and muttered the next instruction. "Mix up the butter, eggs, milk, jam, sugar, flour and spice?"
"Did you read this before we started?"
"I read the ingredients on the assumption that all the ingredients we needed were in that list. Y'know, like a sensible recipe."
I snorted. "So what are we gonna do about spice? Does it say what it is?"
He flipped back through the book, then stopped when he noticed some of the sticky tabs starting to come loose. "I think just anything that'll give it a little kick should be fine."
I pulled a cupboard open and peeked through the jars. No pepper, no cinnamon, no chili... Hmm. "Curry powder do?"
"Maybe just a pinch."
"Pinch away, dude." I tossed the jar over to him. He wasn't too happy about having to catch it. He grumbled, but he let me get on with 'greasing the tin'. The tin... could have used a wash. I didn't have time to give it more than a rinse and a quick scrub, because Rainbow was busy fighting the ingredients in the bowl with a fork, and at some point he was going to pour it on the tin, ready or not. After all, we couldn't completely discount the possibility that we'd have to rapidly vacate the premises.
"Did you use all the butter?"
"Not all of it." I put my hoof on the tin to stop it sliding. "Do we have any cake mix left?"
"Yeah," Rainbow said, plaintively wiping a glob of batter off his nose. "You gonna..."
I held the tin, and he lifted the bowl. The tin slipped out of my hooves and across the counter, flipped up on the sink, and then stuck to the window with a wet slap.
"Did you grease both sides of the tin?"
"Not on purpose,"
"How do you accidentally smear butter on the bottom of a baking tray?"
"Listen, it was slippery, and I dropped it in the stick, I..."
The tin clattered into the sink. Rainbow put the bowl down and laughed into his foreleg on the counter. "Get the tray."
The oven wasn't amazingly warm when we put it in, which was good, because I feel like we would have burned ourselves on it. Rainbow had a fine old time trying to clean up the counter without getting egg and milk on the cookbook, while I winded myself on the sink cleaning butter off the window from the inside. We couldn't remember exactly where all the ingredients belonged, and the jar lids for the sugar and the curry powder were identical for some reason, so hopefully we weren't in for a spicy cuppa once we were all done with this.
The recipe said to cook for an hour and fifteen minutes, which we used to cover the evidence of our breaking and entering. I double-checked the bedroom, because the morning I woke up there with Stars, I wasn't exactly in the mood to do much tidying. That said, I had no idea what the place was like before I got there, so it's entirely possible these hapless sods are going to come back to a house that's tidier than when they left it. Maybe then we can bill them for it.
When we checked on the cake, it had spread flat around the tin, was dark all over the top, and the oven was hazy with smoke. I was pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen, but Rainbow insisted that if we opened the oven too soon, the cake would collapse, according to the book. He changed his mind five minutes later when smoke started pouring out around the oven door.
After we were done coughing and nearly burning ourselves on the tray trying to get it to the counter, we allowed our freshly-baked slab of concrete to cool for ten minutes before attempting to cut it. On some level, we knew as we made the tea that the thing was going to be inedible. We lived in hope until Rainbow tried to cut the thing, and the knife gave way first.
"Do you think they'll enjoy their new doorstop?"
Rainbow spluttered into his tea as we sat at the counter. "We're not leaving this thing here, Atom."
"Then what the hell are we going to do with it?"
"Throw it out, obviously."
"If you put that thing in a rubbish compactor it's going to break it."
"Side of the road. It's fine."
"Of course! A slab this tough will be a perfect durable road surface material." At this point, Rainbow put his hoof in my face and moved it around until I put my tea down and shoved him off.
"So what went wrong?"
"I think mum's recipe might be crap."
"Well it wasn't hers, she copied it down from yonks ago."
I scratched my chin. "Y'know, it was probably a lot easier to find just what you needed before the war."
"How out of date was that fruit? 180, 190 years?"
"I think we've only made the fruit less edible."
"Inn't you supposed to have yeast when you're baking?"
"Asking the wrong pony. Wouldn't it have said so?"
Rainbow shrugged. "Y'think dad had this much trouble with these recipes?"
"I hope so." He thumped my shoulder. "He had like, a decade to practice."
"True. Maybe we should have just done a stew or something easy."
I took a long sip of tea, regarding our new pavement slab. "Nah, I'm glad we tried. I mean, we're still cake-less, but it was something different. It's something nice, not just survival food."
"Hm. That's a good point."
We finished our tea around the same time, and came away with a similar grimace. I could only guess he'd found the same thing I did at the bottom of the mug. "We got the sugar and curry lids mixed up, didn't we?"
He spat into the mug and coughed a couple of times. "Fuckin' hell, we did."