I am resting for a second in the break room while everyone is busy cooking their puff pastries. Man, I am still amazed by the fact that I’m not a walking zombie at the moment. Again, I must have slept less than three hours—heck, less than two, maybe. I, like, took a quick nap, and that was it.

I scratch my head.

Look, I don’t think I’m stupid, alright?

I have some suspicions.

But at the same time, do you know what happens when the protagonist of a movie goes inside the cave? He finds a genie’s lamp, rubs it, and gets absolutely messed up. Exactly.

If you see Stan in the street and you don’t think, ‘Oh, there’s clearly a hidden expert behind the homeless façade,’ then you are clearly not that bright. But here’s the second layer of it: if you recognize the hidden expert with the same ease as spotting the next rock that’s going to explode in Dragonball, your curiosity will be tickled to death.

‘Oh, my, I really have to engage in the main storyline and become a hero.’ Sure, buddy, sure. Go ahead.

I sigh, lost in thought.

After a few more sighs, two things come to me.

First, I really have to have a chat with Stanimal about running away from the inn that night. While I do understand that the big Elf wanted out of a sticky situation, he could have, at the very least, brought Truffles with him.

Dammit. I’m actually getting angry.

I took another big breath.

Second, I kind of want to go back and practice the Cantrips. Wait, even more than the Cantrips, I want to practice the [Lightbolt] spell matrix.

But where?

Oh, wait.

I can ask Lucillus and Antoninus to come with me outside the walls, and I can maybe shoot a tree or a boulder!

Perfect.

Well, I mean, I will first visit all the boys at the Pratus.

“Joey,” Tiberius enters the break room, announced by the clacking of his wooden leg. “We are done.”

“Coming,” I say, hoisting myself up and stretching my back. It’s not that sore or anything, thankfully. The Elves actually have furniture made for tall people. Other than Raissa and a few other exceptions, all the [Bakers] have pretty tall tables they work on.

I walk to the table where several sheets of puff pastry are laying. “Let’s see,” I say, starting to prod them with a finger and breaking off pieces of them.

“That’s mine,” Flaminia says with a cough as I examine what looks like the best one so far.

“Pretty good,” I nod. “The flakiness is still lacking, but that’s because this is your first attempt. I have been to bakeries supposedly specialized in puff pastry that couldn’t even get here. Good. Good. You just need to get used to the ingredient quantities, and that’s it.”

Flaminia nods.

I move on to the next one.

“Chef,” Quintus says, embarrassed, as I look at a very uneven sheet of puff pastry. “That’s mine.”

I frown as I feel some very doughy spots in the puff pastry.

“You forgot to let the butter chill?”

“Yes, Chef,” Quintus lowers his head.

“I’m surprised you’d make such a mistake, Quintus,” I tell the ex-[Soldier]. “Well, you know what not to do now.”

“Yes, Chef. I’m sorry.”

“Heh, apologize to the puff pastry, not to me.”

I go through Tiberius’s and Raissa’s, and both are good enough that there’s not much I need to say.

Now, the last one is Clodia’s.

I look down at a sheet of pretty decent puff pastry. It’s not as good as Flaminia’s, but it’s certainly better than what I imagined she would do.

“Why do you look so surprised?” I hear my boss’ grating voice.

“Huh, nothing, nothing. Just… you are pretty good,” I say.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Flaminia snorts at that.

“Oh, am I?” Clodia starts taking out the huge wooden spoon she always carries with her.

“I mean, you are always managing stuff! I have never seen you bake!” I say, jumping behind Raissa and using her as a meat shield.

“Joey!” Raissa shrieks.

“Take her, Clodia! Take her! I’m too young and handsome to die!”

Clodia stares at the ceiling and puts together a chain of Elven swear words before putting the spoon away.

“Stop being a [Fool]. I would love to spend more time in the kitchen, but I rarely have the time. Especially now that I must create a supply and delivery chain for your crazy ideas.”

“Boss Clodia actually told me I should have been more careful with the butter,” Quintus suddenly says.

I look at the gruff guy with a raised eyebrow.

“Really?”

“She’s always had a good eye for others in the bakery,” Flaminia intercepts the conversation. “Before she started living in her office, the girls would try to work alongside her as much as possible. It was an ongoing joke – and the truth too – that if you stayed by her side, you’d level up faster.”

I look at the muscled [Chef] and [Manager], or probably a mix of the two classes, and click my tongue.

Damn.

Not to throw any shade at Clodia, but she clearly doesn’t enjoy the business-y side of the job as much as she does the Human—well, Elven side of it.

“Everything’s good, then,” I nod. “Just practice more and follow the folding steps as I laid them out. Now, we move on to one of my mother’s favorite cakes.”

I move in front of a table where I made some of the rough chocolate, and I fetch my own puff pastry.

“So, we are going straight for a variant of this recipe. I don’t like the original as much as other people do. But, for the sake of history, I’ll tell you that this recipe is around four-hundred years old. Allegedly, the French invented it. Once the puff pastry is done, we just cut it into a cake-sized shape. Today, I’ll do a circular shape.”

I take a knife and start shaping four circles carefully.

“This cake is called a mille-feuille. Translated from the filthy language, a thousand leaves. The name comes from the ‘leaf’ thing of the puff pastry. There are so many variations of this recipe that pinning down the true original is really hard. But if you had to, it would be four layers of puff pastry and three of crème pâtissier, or pastry cream. In our case, we’ll mix the pastry cream with some heavy cream to make an equivalent of my mother’s version of what some call Chantilly cream. We’ll fill up the lowermost and uppermost layers of the cake with that. Then, we’ll fill the middle layer with a special cream.”

I start rubbing my hands as everyone looks at me, confused.

“Fetch me some hazelnuts and something to crush them into a paste with.”

…

I have heard from older chefs that putting chocolate just about everywhere ruins a recipe. In a broad sense, I agree with such an assessment; you can’t just throw some Nutella inside a pastry and say, ‘Done, perfect.’ At the same time, you can’t refuse to employ something just because it’s too good.

It's like cooking with half a ton of butter or baking with an insane amount of sugar. Is it really cooking? Is it really baking? If you are a housewife or a French bakery, I suppose.

Now, though, there’s another aspect that most don’t know. Hazelnut paste is much more expensive than simple chocolate-flavored custard. Even then, when you eat something filled with chocolate custard, you are usually eating the least expensive chocolate in the world. So many bakeries will just rejoice at the thought of giving you some choux pastry filled to the brim with low-quality chocolate cream.

I rarely lost my patience with my mother. She knew me from the inside out. But one time, I caught her sneaking some of that disgusting chocolate-flavored custard into the bakery.

I don’t think I have ever screamed that much ever since. In fact, I kind of cringe just remembering it. However, that should give you an idea of just how incredibly against the idea of cheaper ingredients I am.

Holy-moly.

I just remembered the main talking point my mother tried to present me with.

‘But Joey, what about people allergic to nuts?’

And don’t be swindled by her—she couldn’t care less about people with allergies. She just wanted to increase the margins on the cream-filled pastries.

Also, if you are indeed allergic to anything, how is that my problem? If a couple of hazelnuts can kill you, maybe don’t go around bakeries.

Oof.

Today must be the day I remember stuff that made me so angry.

Usually, I did not spend much time at the front of the bakery, where we had a massive dining room decorated in a very faux-European style. But sometimes, girls would start shouting at my employees for the lack of ‘gluten-free’ options.

Shouting, yes. You heard me well.

And honestly, not all of them looked hot enough to let it slide.

In defense of my mother, she was the one who decided to hire guards that would shuffle these people out at the first sign of trouble.

“Joey?” Raissa waves a hand in my face.

“Huh?” I say, looking down.

“Are you done?”

I looked at my hands, where I was holding a mortar filled with hazelnuts.

“Oh, right, right. Sorry, got lost in thought.”

…

“The recipe is pretty simple,” I start explaining after I’ve made both fillings. “You add some whipped heavy cream with sugar to the custard, and you add some roasted hazelnut paste to the chocolate. As you saw, you don’t burn the hazelnuts. You toast them lightly. Then, you put both creams inside, with the chocolate and hazelnut spread in the middle.”

I take a spatula and start lathering the first layer with the Chantilly cream.

“Some people use a pastry bag for this, but I think it’s pretentious. Just slap the cream on the layer. If you want to have decorations, they usually look the best if they are whipped cream-based. As for the why, it’s because the white of the cream goes well with the lighter color of the puff pastry. Also, if you want to sell these as single-serve cut-up rectangles to individual customers, you might also want to glaze the top. Some sugar and a little caramel are more than enough. Glaze and a caramel decoration. Again, Flaminia, not too much caramel.”

The pink-haired [Chef] winces when I single her out, but she nods right after.

“Yes, Chef.”

“Anyway,” I say, quickly filling it up, “this is pretty much it. Decorations are important if you are presenting this as a cake, but the taste would be the same. Try it out.”

I cut up some slices and distribute them among my team.

“Rotten roots,” Clodia, the first one to take a bite, swears.

“Incredible,” Flaminia whispers, taking small bites and savoring each one of them for several seconds.

Raissa is simply speechless.

“Can I have seconds?” Antoninus asks.

Wait.

Antoninus?

“What are you doing here? Put down that cake!”

“We were sleeping in a room here, and I smelled something good!”

“Dammit! Who are you? Truffles?! Put down that cake!” Antoninus starts running around the bakery with a second slice of the cake as Clodia slowly extracts the massive wooden spoon from her pink apron and cracks her neck.