"Nopony makes apple pie like yours, AJ," Rainbow Dash said, right before eating the last remaining bite of her pie.
"Aw, shucks. It's the least I can do to repay y'all for helping out with apple-bucking this season." Applejack said. A day of apple-bucking had come to a close, and Applejack had thanked her friends for their help by treating them to a fresh-baked apple pie.
"Repay? Please, Applejack, we aren't so crass as to demand payment. We're your friends, not mere hired help." Rarity levitated a dainty sliver of pie into her mouth. "But I do have to admit that this pie you've made is simply wonderful!"
"It ain't nothing special. Just a family recipe, that's all." Applejack picked up some empty plates and went inside.
"You can tell it's made from scratch," Twilight Sparkle said. "I've tried my hoof at baking, but I usually use pre-made crusts, and they're nowhere near as good as what Applejack can do."
At that very moment, Pinkie Pie swallowed her slice of apple pie, which freed up her mouth; that, in turn, allowed her to, well, be Pinkie Pie. "Stuff made from scratch is always the best! Like, cupcakes made from cake mix are tasty, but cupcakes made from scratch are super tasty! Ooh, and I bet if you made the flour from scratch it would be really really super duper tasty! And if you made all the ingredients from scratch, it would be so super duper tasty your head could fall off!"
Rarity interjected. "But Pinkie, one does not simply—"
"I KNOW! I'm gonna bake the most from-scratch apple pie ever baked in the history of baking!"
Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, and Twilight just stared. Blink, blink.
"Gotta run everypony see you at my next party oh and thanks Applejack I've got so much to do—"
And then Pinkie Pie bolted, oblivious to the confusion she elicited, while mentally plotting the culinary mechanics of the aforementioned most from-scratch apple pie ever baked in the history of baking.
"But I need to know how to bake an apple pie from scratch, first," she mumbled to herself.
===
"Ya want me to give ya what?!"
"C'mon, Applejack! I just want one teensy-weensy recipe."
Applejack was glaring at Pinkie. "No, Pinkie, I ain't gonna just start giving away Apple Family recipes to everypony who asks, and especially not to somepony who works at a bakery." Her tone was stern, but it softened, as did her glare. "Look, Pinkie, yer a good friend and all, but we make good money off our pies, and if I give ya the recipe, what's gonna stop Sugarcube Corner from making pies with our recipe?"
"I'm not going to sell the pies! I'm just going to start off with your from-scratch recipe and make it from-scratchier. Honest! Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye."
...
"And a pie?"
…
"I'll even build a house, take the recipe out of my head and put it in a box in the house, lock up the house, bury the key, and eat the house because it's made out of gingerbread."
All traces of Applejack's frustration evaporated into laughter. "All right, Pinkie. I believe ya."
"Yay! So, you'll give me the recipe now?"
"I'll only tell ya how to make the crust. Now, first ya take a cup of flour..."
===
"...and once yer done reading the alphabet soup, ya gotta sprinkle a bit of flour on the crust. Not too much, though. The wooden horseshoes should have a hairline crack right through the inside, and then ya know it's perfect. If ya can't see a crack, you need to add more flour. Got that?"
"Okie dokie lokie! Except...what do you do with the alphabet soup?"
"Ya eat it," Applejack deadpanned. "Ya know, so ya won't be so hungry and eat the crust before ya even put the filling in. I was tryin' to teach Apple Bloom how to bake a pie, and she never got past the crust."
"That makes sense. Well, time to get started! This from-scratchiest apple pie isn't gonna scratch itself." Pinkie bounced home to Sugarcube Corner.
"You take care, Pinkie!"
===
The sixth attempt at using Applejack's recipe was successful. The first five attempts failed, in ways ranging from the mundane—such as not quite leveling the cup of flour—to the insane—the alphabet soup broth caught on fire the fourth time around. Nonetheless, Pinkie soon mastered the legendary from-scratch crust, and it was fantastic. But that was only the start of Pinkie's quest.
The most important ingredient in the pie crust is flour. Therefore, the flour had to be made from scratch, too. Now, Pinkie wasn't exactly the sharpest cupcake in the dishwasher, but she knew how flour was made, and she didn't have a mill. A mill wouldn't fit under her bed. At least, not with all the party supplies there.
She needed another plan.
===
"Pinkie Pie...this is nuts. Even for you." Rainbow Dash glanced at the, uh, thing that Pinkie Pie had set up. It was a colossal, um, bowl of sorts that was filled with wheat. It had other parts, too, and it was supposed to crush the wheat into flour. The best description of it is that it was a structure engineered and built by Pinkie herself.
"Oh, Dashie. This is wheat, not nuts!" Pinkie adjusted a streamer-truss on her pride and joy of the minute.
Rainbow ignored Pinkie's misunderstanding. "So, let me get this straight. You want me to fly straight down and hit this slipshod thing as hard as I can?"
"Yep!"
"Look, Pinkie, I know I have a reputation for doing dangerous stunts. That doesn't change the fact that you're asking me to hit something that is probably gonna break apart on impact and scatter debris all over Ponyville. I don't think this is a good idea."
"Aw, come on, Dashie! Pleaaaaase?" Pinkie even threw in puppy-dog eyes, no extra charge.
Rainbow Dash groaned. "Oh, all right. But it's your fault if Ponyville gets destroyed." She flew a few dozen feet in the air, not very quickly, as the intent was to build potential energy. Rainbow then took a dive straight down, combining gravity with her own strength to accelerate very, very rapidly. There wasn't enough distance to safely do a Sonic Rainboom, but the forces involved were more than enough to do the job.
One noisy impact later, the structure was still intact. Well, mostly. A few balloons got knocked off, but it was no less structurally dubious than it had been, More importantly, the energy from the impact turned all the wheat into flour. Most importantly of all, Rainbow Dash was lying in the trough, mostly unharmed. Mostly.
"Thanks Dashie!"
"...ugh, no problem, Pie-kie Pink…"
===
The crust made from the flour was good. That was the problem, because it was exactly as good as the earlier crusts. This despite the flour being made from scratch. Making the recipe from-scratchier didn't help at all! Unless...you had to make the wheat from scratch too. And the soil. And the water. And the earth ponies to grow the wheat. But making all those from scratch is silly. Especially the last one.
"This is getting me nowhere! I've gotta go straight to the bottom of this stack of turtles, and I know just the pony to ask!"
===
"No."
"But Twilight, I need you to—"
"I heard you the first time, Pinkie." Twilight Sparkle resumed her studies, levitating a veritable constellation of books and scrolls to peruse.
"So could you—"
"No." Twilight continued reading without missing a saccade. Had she said nothing, it would have qualified as ignoring Pinkie completely.
"Pleaaaaase?"
"Again, no. Not even with a cherry on top, nor whipped cream, and especially not with sprinkles." Twilight finally turned from her studies to make eye contact with Pinkie. "Pinkie, conjuring spells are very dangerous, and I'm not going to risk hurting you for all the flour in the world."
"Oh, all right..." Pinkie dejectedly walked out the door, defeated in her quest.
Twilight continued her studies. Coincidentally, she chanced upon a formula to create conjuring spells. One that was difficult to compute and tedious to cast, but, in principle, it was completely safe. And she had just so happened to have mastered the necessary operation last week. This was exactly what Pinkie was looking for. Dozens of books dropped to the floor; Twilight had no need for them right now.
"Spike! Could you fetch me a quill, some parchment, and re-shelve the entire Q shelf of the library?"
===
Pinkie had just finished her shift at Sugarcube Corner. While her failure at making the from-scratchiest pie ever had stung, she didn't let it get to her. Not much gets to Pinkie Pie as long as her friends are there, and she had made batch after batch of cupcakes, blessed with a spring in her step and a song in her throat, as usual. She was now aimlessly bouncing around Ponyville, wondering which of her friends were free for the day.
"There you are, Pinkie!" Twilight galloped up to Pinkie, carrying a piece of parchment covered in obscure notation. "I've got something very important to tell you!"
"Does it involve chocolate-flavored balloons?"
"Not quite. But remember when I told you that conjuring spells were just too dangerous? I managed to find one that isn't! I've already worked out everything we need. Could you—"
Pinkie Pie had long since vanished, having left behind a piece of paper with "ALREADY THERE" written on it.
"—meet me at the library."
===
"So you're just gonna cast a spell and then poof, flour happens?"
"Basically, yes. But it's a demanding spell to cast, and it needs reagents, some of which are hard to come by." Twilight levitated several pieces of parchment and examined each while she continued to talk. "For starters, we need seven drops of rainbow, and we can't exactly just fly on up to Cloudsdale and swipe some rainbow."
"Ooh! I got this!" Pinkie vanished, then came back almost immediately, carrying a test tube containing a small amount of pure rainbow.
Twilight gaped. "But—how the—how did you get?"
Just then, a cyan pegasus with a short white mane darted landed in front of the library and began pounding furiously on the door. "PINKIE PIIIIIE!"
"I, uh, kinda borrowed Rainbow Dash's mane. Whoopsies." Pinkie Pie shrugged.
Twilight sighed and facehoofed. "Put it back, Pinkie, then we can get the other reagents for the spell."
Rainbow Dash—if one could still call her that—managed to bust down the door. "You're using my mane's color for a spell?"
"Well, we were going to—"
Rainbow cut Twilight off. "That's so awesome! What's the spell for, anyway?"
"Twilight's gonna make a whole bunch of flour from scratch!" Pinkie grinned.
Silence. "Well, that's...kinda cool, I guess," Rainbow Dash said. "The color's gonna come back by tomorrow. Just, if you're gonna bake stuff with the flour, make sure to save me something, 'kay?"
===
Twilight continued to enumerate the reagents. "Along with the rainbow, we need four apples—"
Pinkie left, then soon returned with five apples, or four and a half to be exact. (She was hungry.) Check.
"—eleven smooth black stones—"
Check.
"—a chicken feather—"
Check.
"—and four strands of earth pony hair."
"That one's easy!" Pinkie Pie proceeded to try to pinch a tuft of her mane through a series of head gyrations. After much mane-flopping and a few stumbles, Pinkie managed to pluck out four strands of her own earth pony hair.
"Got it!" Pinkie tottered over to place the strands somewhere near their proper place. Twilight did some fine adjustment as Pinkie shook the dizziness out of her head.
"And that should do it. Now leave the rest to me." Twilight's horn lit up, and the reagents began to swirl through the air. The objects converged together, becoming a small, shining point of light. Twilight closed her eyes and began to strain, which caused the light to grow larger.
===
The library soon grew dark as Twilight's magic filled the area, and soon, the two ponies were standing in darkness, lit only by a solitary spark. The spark inflated to fill Pinkie's field of vision. Before she could even think to shield her eyes, the wall of white grew smaller, about the size of a pony. At first glance, Pinkie thought the smaller version was dimmer, but on closer examination, it was actually sparse, made of innumerable specks. Each speck drifted by itself, but the entire configuration was still a collective whole. The magical construct reflected off Pinkie's eyes; she stared in awe as it cast trails of light around the library, partly restoring the lighting that was temporarily blocked by the spell.
One by one, the specks of light disappeared. Some guttered; some popped like balloons, emitting a flash of very bright light; some simply dimmed into obscurity. As the last speck vanished, the library became visible again in the normal light of the sun. Twilight collapsed on the floor as Pinkie Pie jumped up and down, chanting "Do it again! Do it again!"
And then Pinkie Pie was covered in flour.
===
Pinkie giggled. "Look, Twilight! You just made flour from scratch!"
Twilight stood up shakily, groaning as she did so. "Ugh...so I did! Glad it worked, but I don't think I'll ever be doing that again. But wouldn't it have been easier to just buy a sack of flour? Why on earth did you want this, anyway?"
Pinkie took a deep, deep breath, and Twilight braced herself for a wall of Pinkie, "Well, I wanted to make the most from-scratch pie in the history of baking so I got Applejack to give me her crust recipe which I promised never to use but I wanted the whole thing to be from scratch so I got a bunch of wheat and got Rainbow Dash to grind it into flour but it wasn't any better so I figured I needed to go further from scratch so I asked you for your magic and then you said no but then you said yes and then you cast that wacky spell and then poof, flour happened!"
"But how is conjured flour any more made from scratch than milled flour? I needed the spell book, some scrolls and my magic, and you needed wheat, a mill, and Rainbow Dash. I don't see how there'd be any difference at all."
"It's totally different! First, there's...uh...um...you know what, Twilight, you're right." Pinkie flopped onto her haunches. "Looks like I can't make a super duper from-scratch apple pie after all. Not if I have to keep using things to make them."
"Looks like you've discovered the Law of Conservation of Mass," Twilight said. Pinkie just stared blankly at Twilight. "Um, ignore that. Anyway, I know you wanted to make the best pie ever, but trust me, anything you bake is going to be delicious, no matter how many hoops you jump through—"
"Applejack's recipe calls for sixteen hoops!"
"—because you're a good baker. You don't have to do a bunch of crazy stunts to make something good. All you need is hard work, knowledge, and a good attitude, and I know you've got all three of those when it comes to baking. Even if you can't make the flour from scratch, making the pie from scratch is good enough."
Pinkie Pie stood up. "Thanks, Twilight. Even though I didn't actually do what I wanted to do, I'll take this flour, bake some cupcakes, and throw a party anyway."
"There's just one problem with that, Pinkie."
"What's that?"
"Most of the flour is stuck in your coat."