Free Web NovelChapter 283: Dragged Along
No one would have even dreamed of turning a Complete High-Rank Adept, two Peak Spirit Initiates, a princess, two noble daughters, and a noble son into kitchen helpers, but that was exactly what Lucas had done.
Taking advantage of their confusion, Lucas assigned everyone, along with some of the kitchen maids from the villa, to certain tasks in something he called an ’assembly line’.
When all the ingredients and equipment arrived, Lucas began giving precise instructions on how to make his signature sponge cake.
Up until that point, everything had proceeded relatively smoothly, but it wasn’t long before ’problems’ began to pop up.
Sasha was already familiar with the recipe for sponge cake.
In fact, she and Lucas had worked on it together back in Redwood Town, refining it over and over until they had achieved a result they both deemed acceptable.
It wasn’t as good as the ones from Lucas’ inherited memories, but even compared to desserts that Sasha had tasted back when she was still living in the Balfour Family Manor, it was an exquisite masterpiece.
In any case, with Sasha and Lucas directing the operation, the kitchen staff, Christina, Allina, and Vanessa all got down to work, all of them showing remarkable competence in their assigned roles.
Audrey and Kaden, the two young nobles, seemed a bit overwhelmed at first.
Thanks to their shared hobby, both of them were fairly good at handling raw ingredients, but neither of them had any real experience cooking.
Taking this into account, they were mainly assigned tasks like preparing pans or weighing out ingredients using a set of scales which Lucas had developed.
Lucas had packed a whole set of his standardized metric measuring equipment into his emergency Space Bag, so it had fortunately not been lost along with most of his other belongings back in Redwood Town.
Additionally, Celestina had also acquired rulers, weights, and scales from her Disciple’s collection as she had found them to be quite interesting and useful.
Now, these measurement tools were coming in handy in a most unexpected way.
Eris, who was at least familiar with these new tools, also helped out here.
As for the Marquess herself... well, she did her best to help out, but after a few... incidents, everyone agreed it would best if Celestina just supervised instead.
The biggest surprise in all of this was definitely Christina’s proficiency in the kitchen, but the skills both Allina and Vanessa possessed were quite shocking as well; after all, they were both daughters of Viscount Rank Families who had spent most of their lives in the army. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
"Where did we learn to cook?" Allina asked back, after Sasha casually brought up the subject.
"Well... funny you should ask..." Vanessa also chimed in before the two of them unconsciously shifted their gazes to the princess who was currently spreading cake batter into a large rectangular baking pan.
Seemingly sensing their gazes, Christina lifted her head and glanced back, a confused look filling her face.
Seeing this all-too-familiar look, both Allina and Vanessa couldn’t help laughing lightly, causing even more confusion amongst the people gathered in the kitchen.
"Those two were dragged around a lot by Tina’s mother," in the end, it was the still somewhat dazed Celestina who finally answered, "That girl loved trying new things, from sewing to spear-fishing, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she took them to practice cooking as well at some point in the past."
"En, that’s right," Vanessa nodded, "Just now, when you tilted your head, you looked exactly like your mother back when she was your age, Tina. Even the apron and ponytail match that time when she suddenly came and forced the two of us to hunt boars for her to practice her butchering and roasting skills."
"Really?" Christina gawked, muttering in a somewhat taken aback tone, "That’s hard to imagine... Mother always seems so elegant and mild-mannered..."
Celestina, Vanessa, and Allina, who were all quite familiar with the kingdom’s Third Queen, couldn’t stop their faces from cramping a bit when they heard this.
Although the current Cynthia Morgan, Christina’s mother, was a demure noble lady who appeared delicate and soft-spoken, in her youth, she had been extremely outgoing and excentric.
In fact, she still was, she just hid it better.
Vanessa had been, and still was free-spirit, but the young Cynthia was on a completely different level.
Being severely doted on by her father, Count Morgan, Cynthia had tried her hand at almost everything she could think of, gone on all sorts of adventures, and gotten into all kinds of trouble, often dragging Allina and Vanessa along with her.
With her powerful background, and her two strong big sisters looking out for her, Cynthia was absolutely fearless in her younger years.
Those days were quite stressful for Allina and Vanessa, and they were often scolded for going along with and even enabling Cynthia’s outlandish behaviour, but looking back now, they would be lying if they said they hadn’t had a lot of fun in the process.
What’s more, although the young Cynthia was more than a bit unruly and extravagant, she was still fundamentally kind and caring.
For instance, while it was true that Cynthia had roped Allina and Vanessa into hunting boars for her just so she could practice her skinning, dismantling, and spit-roasting skills, once she was done, Count Morgan’s young daughter took all the food she cooked and distributed it to various orphanages in the city.
This innate goodness was something Cynthia had passed on to her daughter, though in Allina and Vanessa’s opinion, Christina was much more reasonable and responsible than her mother was at her age.
Unfortunately, Cynthia had also passed some of her more unusual knowledge and quirks on to the young Genius Princess as well.
A perfect example of this would be how the Third Queen had taught her daughter about her special, sure-fire method to make men forget about things; i.e.: by getting them dead drunk and then whacking them hard over the head.
Christina had even tried to employ a variation of this method on Lucas shortly after they met, but fortunately for the young boy, he had managed to escape with his memories intact.
Speaking of Lucas, he was also having a hard time controlling his expression when his big bear of a friend came over and whispered to him, "Teacher Lucas, who exactly is Big Sister Tina? How come Marquess Balfour, Lady Crest, and Lady Clark all seem so familiar with her mother?"
Christina is a princess, and her mother is a queen, of course Celestina, Vanessa, and Allina know her... was something Lucas naturally couldn’t just blurt out.
And so, pretending to focus on controlling the heat of the wood-burning ovens, the young boy simply replied, "Tina’s mom comes from a Count Rank Family, so I guess she was friends with Big Sister Allina and Vanessa in her youth."
"Oooh..." Kaden nodded in understanding, "So Big Sister Tina is the granddaughter of a Count, just like Audrey."
"Er..." Lucas’ brow twitched again, but he still managed to nod, "Yeah, something like that."
Hoping to move along from this awkward subject, Lucas opened the oven, used a towel to pull out a sheet of sponge-cake, and pricked it with a skewer.
When the skewer came out clean, the young boy smiled widely and nodded. This batch, unlike the first few, had come out just right.
It had taken Lucas and Sasha a few attempts to get the temperature and timing right with these unfamiliar ovens. The first cake they tried to bake had burnt badly, the second was done on the outside, but raw in the centre.
On their third try, however, it seemed they had gotten everything basically worked out.
By now, the entire kitchen was filled with the smell of freshly baked cake, causing everyone in the room, from the noble Marquess to the humble maids, to sniff the air in anticipation, their stomachs growling hungrily.
Looking around at all the predatory gazes fixed on him, or rather the cake he was holding, Lucas scratched his head awkwardly and asked, "Aunt Sasha, how much sugar do we have left?"
Quickly checking the containers nearby, Sasha promptly replied, "We have about 5 kg of maple, and just over 5 kg of regular sugar."
Eggs, milk, butter, and high-quality flour were all somewhat difficult to come by for commoners, but for a Count Rank Family like the Carlsons, they naturally had plenty in stock.
So, when Lucas requested some ingredients from the villa staff so that he could prepare his special dessert for tonight’s banquet, they hadn’t even bothered asking for permission from the main kitchen in the manor.
Sugar, however, was a different story. freewebnøvel.com
The sweet crystals were considered a luxury good in the Rockwell Kingdom and cost no small amount to import from the Darr Kingdom; as such, the amount the Head Chef of the Carlson Family was willing to part with was limited.
1 small barrel of sugar, weighing approximately 6 kg, was what Lucas had received, and when he opened it to inspect the quality, he couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed as it was a very dark brown colour, indicating that its actual sugar content was quite low.
Lucas had anticipated this though, and asked Sasha to bring out the last of their maple sugar. By mixing the two sugars together in equal parts, Lucas was able to come up with what he deemed an acceptable blend for baking proper cakes.
It took about 200 grams of sugar to make enough sponge-cake for 10 people, and there were going to be around 400 guests tonight at the banquet. In other words, of the 10 kg of sugar they had left, only 8 kg was needed to complete tonight’s dessert.
Which meant...
