“For the moment, I’d like all six of you to call me Chef,” I explain to my assistants. “Working as a baker is hard, but only if you don’t know what you are doing.”

“Joey,” Tiberius suddenly interrupts me. “You didn’t say anything about actually making food,” he says, panicked.

“Shush. It’s Chef Joey. Not Joey. Trust me on this. All of you will be paid anyway.”

“Huh,” I see Claudius scratch his head. “I thought I was supposed to make runes, not pastry.”

“You’ll be making both, in fact.”

I look around the discouraged crowd as Flaminia picks the best people, including Melina and Violante. From what I’ve seen, Violante is considered the third-best after Clodia and Flaminia. I also follow Raissa’s eyes traveling to the adversary’s crowd.

“Yo,” I clap my hands and steel my voice. “All of you! Stand to attention!”

Everyone, including my dear Stanimal, straightens up.

“Today, we will be making a very elaborate cake. Before touching any ingredients, you should always get to know the story of your recipes. This one is called Cassata Siciliana. That’s my ancestor’s original language, if you are curious. Anyway, it’s typically made around a specific holiday some Humans celebrate. The decorations will be made in a baroque style. I’ll show you what it means when we get to it.”

“The name comes from yet another foreign word, Quas’at, which is from another group of people–different from my ancestors. It means ‘big circular bowls.’ Yeah, yeah, I know it doesn’t sound fancy. But we are still going to make six of them. Five that will teach you how to decorate, and one for the actual contest. I’d like for you to bring your own version of the cake to the people you love and cherish. We can eat mine after the competition has tasted it and cried.”

“Chef?” Raissa raises her hand.

“Yes?”

“Where do we start from?” She asks, looking worriedly at the other group that has already started mixing stuff. Even though there’s no time limit for this, it still puts pressure on you to be the one chasing.

“Different people will be responsible for different tasks,” I say with a smile. “You and Tiberius are making the sponge cake base. Arrange the ingredients and let Claudius draw a simple cooling and a heating rune close to each other. That way, you will be able to heat and cool the baking mix to ensure that the sugar is melted and that the sponge cake will be slightly chewier than usual. Mixing the ingredients at a lower temperature will help with that, especially if you are warming them up in between. Keep them moving–that’s the most important part. I’ll help you with the quantities. Raissa, take the lead and explain to those two what a sponge cake is.”

“Truffles,” I say to the blondie, “you’ll be in charge of the cheese. I’ll give you a strainer, and you’ll need to filter it until you have gotten rid of all the smelly, harder parts. It must be super creamy before moving forward and mixing it with the sugar.”

“Stanimal, Quintus, you two are on the candied fruit,” I say, taking out several oranges, cherries, a pumpkin, and a few green fruits that taste distinctively like kiwis but with a tangier, sweeter note. “This is what you will do: you’ll squish half of the fruit into a paste and extract the liquid. Once the liquid is ready, I’ll show you the next step.”

“Everybody, do you understand? If you have any questions, do not be afraid to ask. There’s no shame in learning. When I come to survey your work, I’ll further explain why you are doing this the way you are and how to correct any mistakes you might have made.”

“Yes, Chef,” Raissa snaps to attention, her eyes locked on me. Even though she’s slightly trembling, she has taken the challenge to heart.

“Perfect,” I smile, “I’ll get started on the most difficult part, then.”

On Earth, this would actually be the easiest part of all. You could just go to any store and buy some ready-to-go chocolate chips. But these people don’t have chocolate… so.

Oh right! You probably don’t remember, but Stan did mention ‘Pigfeed’ in the past. Well, it turns out that Elves do have chocolate. They have semi-tropical weather, and apparently, cocoa trees grow here with ease. Do you know what the fun part is? No one has discovered chocolate yet.

Instead, they give the cocoa fruit to animals, especially the husks. To someone who has never studied the chocolate-making process, this would sound stupid, right? Some might even think that chocolate would be poisonous to animals. Well, that’s dogs. Dogs are ‘allergic’ to theobromine. The same cannot be said for pigs and cows, though. But that alone wouldn’t justify what’s happening here.

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To be clear, do you realize how insane it is for people to feed cocoa to animals? Not because it’s poisonous, but because of what a wonderful – and expensive – product it is. But maybe that’s just the perspective of a North American. South America’s avocado market has been almost single-handedly ruined by Spain–Spaniards eat a lot of avocados, and that had the price of avocados shoot up on the original continent. If Elves can grow cocoa as easily as South Americans can grow avocados, it makes sense that they would not care about it much.

Now, the husks of the cocoa fruit are usually given to chemical industries back on Earth. You can extract a lot of useful chemicals from them. Some people use the husks to cover the top layer of the soil of potted or garden plants. Now, if you feed a product that’s rich in useful chemicals to animals, you are going to get very good shit. Pardon my French. It’s not a curse word in this case. You actually get excrements rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium…

And guess what?

They are the chemical elements that are most frequently used in fertilizers.

Yep. The [Farmers] in Amorium know a lot about good excrement, and they also know how to use fertilizer. That’s the good thing about skills. You can get them if you do the right thing, even if you are not 100% sure you have done the right thing. There must have been a [Farmer] who threw his animals’ feces on the crop, and, boom, he probably got something like [Enriched Terrain].

When you consider that most farmers are much more intuitive than what common people give them credit for, there you have it.

But before I move on to making chocolate, there’s another extremely interesting bit of trivia.

When I went with Stan to get some chocolate pods before the bake-off, I found something very interesting. My first thought when Stan had started explaining what Pigfeed was had been that people must be absolutely stupid. Chocolate contains theobromine and caffeine, which are stimulants, right? How come [Mages] are not scooping up the cocoa pulp and seeds and crushing them with their butt cheeks if they are all as exhausted as Lucinda? It really doesn’t make any sense.

Or it does if Elves have dogs that died after eating cocoa. And it does even more if you consider that for someone who has never tasted caffeine, even a small amount could give them tremendous heart palpitations. Now, if Elves had just taken a seed every now and then, they would have experienced some amazingly beneficial effects. But guess what? They didn’t. Most people tried eating more than a few seeds and a lot of pulp—which is arguably the equivalent of downing ten big cups of coffee while being a total coffee virgin.

BUT.

There’s always a but.

[Farmers] did.

[Farmers] are apparently as hooked up on fresh cocoa as their animals.

And here we go with another interesting piece of trivia about farm animals.

The amount of exercise a pig or a cow gets does not significantly affect the quality of its meat. Cows and pigs were always meant to roam free and play and, especially, do the right amount of physical labor. Now, what happens if you hook up these beasts on caffeine, huh? Well, they are going to be more active. And if you are using them to till the fields, there you go. [Farmers], on the other hand, mostly chew on the seeds when they wake up for that caffeine jolt. Back on Earth, it’s sadly a little-known fact that a lot of farmers, at least up to the pre-industrial times, tried hard to use all the daylight they could. That means they got up early. And it’s pretty much the same here.

And as I was saying, meat quality is not immediately impacted by exercise as much as other factors. The flavor and tenderness of beef are primarily determined by the breed of cow, its age, its diet, and how it is raised and processed. For example, cows that are raised on a varied diet and have access to plenty of clean water and fresh air are likely to produce meat that is of higher quality than cows that are raised in crowded, dirty conditions.

While I was talking to Stanimal, I remembered that I do know some Australian ranchers who feed chocolate husks to their wagyu cows. But that still has very little caffeine.

Instead, if you fed an insane amount of caffeine to the cows all throughout their lives, it would make them much more active than usual.

Let me explain something else. The more relatively lean muscle mass a cow has, the more meat you can consume, but most importantly, the more myoglobin you can actually find inside the muscle. Why is this important? Because we like our meat red, don’t we? And guess what the main pigment that creates that nice, scarlet color is? Yep. Myoglobin. Myoglobin is the main muscle pigment that picks up oxygen in meat.

So, blooming, the process that turns meat into a nice red color after oxygenating the meat, relies on myoglobin. If your cow is a fat, lazy thing, its muscles won’t be tight enough, and they will be full of water. Too much water will make it very hard for oxygen to get to the meat once you slaughter your cow.

When I asked Stan about it, he told me that they stopped feeding the Pigfeed to cows and pigs a day or two before they slaughtered them. They found out the meat tasted better if they did…

Again, the [Farmers] here are smarter than any [Baker] I met—never underestimate the jobs that look simpler than others, trust me. And you know why they stop feeding them the caffeine stuff? If you have a cow that’s caffeine-crushing, its levels of cortisol will go down. When they do, the body stops using sugar as much, which, in turn, means that the meat will get more ‘sugar’ inside of it, segregated. That ensures the prime condition to create the perfect pH for their meat after slaughter.

Jesus.

I haven’t really tasted beef on its own since I came here, but after thinking about all this stuff, I’m 100% going to get a huge steak after I win the competition.

Anyway, the fact that most people associated chocolate with something poisonous only pigs and cows could eat means farmers were the only ones who ate it. That, too, contributed to the pejorative of ‘Pigfeed.’

But guess who has a lot of experience dealing with chocolate, no matter how creative you have to get to produce some of that sweet, heavenly polished product?