Choose Your Own Adventure: Maud's Education

by Palm Palette

(13)

Maud took her time rearranging the kitchen to fit her needs for this special family recipe of hers. There weren't proper tools for this, but she made do by arranging glasses and pitchers on the stove and connecting them together with straws. When she was done, her setup looked more like something that belonged in a chemistry lab than a kitchen.

Taste Explosion gave her odd looks, but waited to see what she would come up with. Maud added sugar, food coloring, and rocks to her 'beakers' and dissolved them in various solutions over an open flame. Once they were liquid, she allowed them to mix together in specific quantities and the final mixtures were pulled off the flames and allowed to cool. With a piece of string in each for the thick liquid to crystallize on, Maud watched watched as they grew and broke the crystals off into a bowl once they'd reached a certain size.

Once she was finished, her bowl looked as if it was full of coarse pebbles. She presented it to Taste Explosion. “Rock candy.”

He grabbed a hoof-full of the stuff and popped it in his mouth. “Hmm, it's crunchy, and sweet, and chalky. That's certainly an interesting combo. It's not bad. Not bad at all.” He offered the bowl back to her. “Why don't you try some and tell me how it compares with other batches you've made?”

Maud declined. “No. I don't eat it. I don't even like candy.”

Taste raised an eyebrow. “You don't eat it? What do you do with it then?”

“I make necklaces for other ponies. It's a family tradition.”

“I... see.” Taste looked disappointed. “No offense, but cooking's a full-body experience. It's something that you need to be passionate about from the inside out—especially the inside. I'm not saying that what you made is bad, just that what you've made is less like cooking and more like edible fashion. If this is what you're the most passionate about and you won't even eat it then, well, perhaps you'd be better off studying a different field.”

Drat.

Start over?