> Twilight Makes: Bread
>  by ESC After Dark
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Science and Baking
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bread.  It was perhaps the most important food to have ever existed.  The ability to store grain and use it well after harvest made it into a staple of civilization, with beer and wine coming in a close second and third.  It was a sign of agriculture and the very beginnings of farming, professions, and civilized society.  Some say that the first cutie mark likely depicted a loaf of bread.

Twilight appreciated bread in a historical sense as much as in a flavor and nutritional sense.  Flour, water, sugar, and a bit of yeast was all it took in theory.  It was the last ingredient that was, perhaps, the second most important.  Yeast made the bread rise, making it more palatable and texturally pleasant.

Due to her appreciation of bread, when Twilight discovered that she had a yeast infection, she had an idea that horrified her almost as much as it piqued her curiosity.  Could she make bread with the yeast from her infection?

It was that morbid curiosity that led her to the bathroom with a small spoon in her mouth and an empty jar hanging in her magical grip, staring at her inflamed and itchy vagina with a grimace.  With a deep breath, she pulled the warmed spoon from her mouth and brought it around back.  She cringed as she used the small metal scoop to push herself open, looking in the mirror and concentrating on making sure she didn't accidentally hurt herself with the spoon.

Deeper the spoon went, the entire thing disappearing into her vagina so as to allow her to scrape her cervix directly.  She wasn't certain that the infection was most concentrated there, but she was not going to let a desire to be done encroach on being thorough.  Methodically, she began scraping every last bit of her vagina with the spoon, starting at her cervix and moving backwards towards her vaginal opening.

About halfway through, Twilight could feel a slight buildup of material and scooped out the mass.  Like watching a trainwreck, she stared in disgusted horror as an offwhite white glob of puss, yeast, and dead cells slurped out of her itchy pussy and into the jar below.  She didn't dare smell it.

Reinserting the spoon, she scraped out the rest of her vagina and scooped as much of the disgusting brew into the jar as she could.  Once done, she put a lid on the jar, threw the spoon into the trash, and shoved a tube of antifungal cream halfway up her vagina and emptied the entire thing.  Once the tube was removed, she felt like a harlot after a long day's work, but she was desperate to end the infection as quickly as possible.

She clenched her abdominal muscles, sending a spurt of cream out, splattering on the mirror.  With her magic, she picked it up and smothered her pussy with it, moaning in relief as it cooled the itchy burn slightly.  Once coated, she used her magic to evenly spread the massive glob of cream all over her inner walls, even going so far as to push a bit through her cervix and into her womb proper.

Once completely coated inside and out, Twilight sat on the toilet and pushed, squeezing the excess cream out.  She had never felt more disgusting in her life, but she felt relieved that, so long as she could keep her culture alive, she never had to go through such a disgusting ordeal again.



The first step in turning her yeast into bread had nothing to do with baking.  Instead of being in the kitchen, Twilight was in her lab with most of her petri dishes and her jar containing the vaginal yeast sample.  Due to the discomfort caused by acquiring the sample, and the impurity caused by dead cells, vaginal secretions, and any number of other undesirable components, Twilight opted to use the sample to start yeast cultures.

Culture Group A.1 of her petri dishes contained various concentrations of malt syrup diluted with water, Culture Group A.2 contained concentrations of malt syrup that had been heated to potentially make the malt syrup nondiastatic, if it wasn't already.  Twilight was hoping that she would see a difference between the two, as it would confirm that the malt syrup was diastatic and that the presence of enzymes had an effect on the growth rate of the yeast.

Culture Group B contained various concentrations of maltose sugar dissolved in water, and Culture Group C contained the same but with 90% glucose syrup instead of maltose.  It had been difficult to get ahold of, but the reduced maltose concentration would make it worth the effort.

Culture Group D contained mixtures with diluted High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS 55), and Culture Group E mixtures with simple cane sugar in water, and finally Culture Group F contained agar she had lying around, in various concentrations of course.

To Twilight's regret, she didn't have enough petri dishes for a Group G, which would have contained milk.

One by one, Twilight put a tiny droplet of her yeast sample, diluted with deionized water, into each of the seventy petri dishes.  It took less than fifteen minutes, but the repetitive task made it feel like much longer.  Once done, she loaded all of the dishes up into her incubator and set it to 25° C.  What remained of the original sample, to ensure it would be available if something went wrong, was frozen.

Satisfied with her work, Twilight took a break from her bread making activities to consider ways to make vinegar.



After three days, to Twilight's great disappointment, Culture Groups A.1 and A.2 had nearly identical results.  If the enzymes were present, they had no effect on the growth of the yeast.

Groups B, D, and E showed very little growth with Group F having only slightly more.  Group C is where the fungus thrived, growing much more vigorously than any of the other groups.  What appeared to be the exclusive assimilation of glucose made Twilight think that she could pin down the species, one of the most common in vaginal infections unsurprisingly.

Theories and results from various sources confirmed or clarified, Twilight tossed out all but two samples from Group C, freezing one and leaving the other out with a biohazard warning on it.  Twilight headed to the kitchen.  Bread making time had officially begun.

In the kitchen, Twilight opened her favorite recipe book (101 Essential Recipes and Why they are so Delicious by Caramel Combustion) and quickly found a simple bread recipe.  She'd have to modify it slightly, replacing the sugar with glucose syrup to give her strain sugar it could actually consume.

The bread probably wouldn't be sourdough, not technically.  It might have been had she used the original sample and turned it into a starter, but she believed that her cultured sample was almost entirely yeast.  As such, she replaced the baker's yeast in the recipe with her own yeast, doubling it to ensure she would get enough carbon dioxide production.  Baker's yeast strains were specifically selected for carbon dioxide production, and Twilight's vaginal yeast was not.

With her magic, Twilight dumped one cup of water, three tablespoons of glucose syrup and four cups of flour into a large mixing bowl and added a bit of salt for flavor.  Ingredients added, she grabbed a second larger bowl and put a bit of oil in the bottom.  Once ready, she brought the two bowls back to her lab and dumped her left out yeast sample into her bread mix.

With her magic, she brought the ingredients together into a dough and kneaded it until the water and flour had formed enough gluten to make the dough the right consistency and stretchyness.  After a few minutes of kneading, she put the dough into the second bowl with oil, covered it with a small towel, and set it out on the counter.

If all went well over the next few hours, the dough would double in size as the yeast got to work.  In the meantime, Twilight had some experiments to do with her blood plasma.

She also had to switch to treating her infection with vaginal suppositories, as the cream seemed to have been having no effect.



Four hours and some experimentation later, Twilight checked on the dough.  It had actually risen, much to Twilight's delight.  It wasn't doubled in size like traditional yeast would be capable of, but growing to about one and a half times its original size meant that the yeast was working.

With her magic, she punched it down and rolled it up into a rough log shape.  With a plop, Twilight dropped the dough into a loaf pan she had prepared earlier and covered it again.

The second rise barely happened at all, even after Twilight let it sit for four more hours.

Mildly upset, but not entirely surprised, she went ahead and baked the dense loaf.

Twilight stared at the loaf of bread in the pan, a mask on her muzzle and a barrier of magic separating the bread from herself.  When the parasitic fungus had been wet, she hadn't been very concerned about it, but now that it was fairly dry, she was taking no chance of getting a yeast infection in her mouth, sinuses, or lungs.  Her lab oven had been thoroughly disinfected, and she was much more cautious about airborne spores since it had been baked and dried out by the heat.

The bread looked disappointing by bread standards, smaller than it was supposed to be due to the lackluster second rise.  Carefully, she dumped it out onto parchment paper on one of her lab desks and winced as it came out with a thud.  It was undeniably dense, much more dense than it was supposed to be.

Carefully, Twilight cut a slice and examined it, taking notes as she went.  It had extremely small bubbles visible in the bread, unlike something such as sourdough bread which had large, plainly visible cavities within.  The bread had a dense, grainy texture more like a pound cake than a loaf of bread.  She was unwilling to attempt to eat it and see how it tasted.

After her observations were made and cataloged, Twilight disposed of the bread and bread pan in accordance with proper procedure.  All in all, it was a strange experiment.  However, it raised questions and had piqued a line of curiosity that Twilight had never explored before.  What other foods could be made from pony biological components?

Twilight looked over to her blood plasma separation machine and picked up the waiting bottle of cheap whiskey.  She intended to find out, preferably in a way that didn't result in a biohazard.  It would result in a drunk Twilight though.