WHO: Fred Weasley and Alicia Spinnet WHAT: Concocting a surprise for Ang's bday! WHEN: Thursday, 27 October WHERE: The twins' flat WARNINGS: Bad baking advice!
Despite having no experience baking, Fred was certain that he could bake the perfect birthday cake with no problems. He was the son of Molly Weasley, after all, surely that had to come with an innate ability in the kitchen. And if not, he had Alicia too, and there was no way that between the two of them they couldn’t figure this whole cake thing out.
“So,” Fred started, looking around the kitchen. “Do you have a recipe?”
“Not...yet,” Alicia said, already in the process of whipping out her phone to look one up. “I’ve got us covered, though.” She glanced up from the screen and grinned across the counter at him. “Honestly, how hard could it be? Tons of people bake cakes.”
“Right?” Fred agreed, starting to pull out ingredients he assumed were in cakes. “And tons of people do it for fun too and not that many people like doing stuff that’s super hard for fun.” He’d never understood why his mum had insisted on filling their pantry with so called “staples” when they’d moved, but easily finding the unopened flour and sugar there now he was finally grateful she had. “And we’re geniuses. If anyone can bake the perfect cake with no experience, it’s us.”
“And you know why?” She tapped on the screen of her phone and held it up as the recipe loaded. She was a decent cook but she’d never been much of a baker. That did little to dampen her confidence. “Because geniuses are great at following directions!”
As someone who’d never been good at following directions, Fred could already see the flaw in that logic but, confident in his innate ability to be good at anything, he didn’t point this out to Alicia. “So when it’s done do you think we should decorate it Stranger Things themed, Quidditch themed or just with her face?”
Alicia folded her arms across her chest and considered the bag of flour Fred had retrieved as though she might be able to see the cake if she stared at it long enough. After a moment, she turned to him with a broad grin on her face. “What if we decorate it with her fighting a demogorgon on a Quidditch pitch? All three in one!”
Fred’s own grin grew to match Alicia’s at that suggestion. “Perfect!” With that sorted, he supposed it was time to actually look at the recipe and start baking. “So when it says cups do you think normal cups are fine? I don’t have any of those special baking ones like my mum does.”
“It probably doesn’t have to be exact,” Alicia said with a shrug. She changed the ingredients in recipes all the time and they were always at least still edible. How different could baking be? She glanced down at her screen once more before she announced, “Three cups of flower!”
“Yeah, and good bakers use their intuition or whatever,” Fred agreed, pulling out a bowl and a cup and measuring 3 cups of flour out. “We’d just seem like amateurs if we measured everything exactly.”
“Exactly,” she said with a decisive nod. It made perfect sense to her. “And every chef has their own recipe. Otherwise how would all these chefs have their own cookbooks?”
“We should bring out our own cookbook after this. If everyone else is doing it, why can’t we?” He roughly measured out the rest of the ingredients and added them to the bowl, mixing it until it came together. “Does that look right?”
Alicia peered over the edge of the bowl and bit her lip in thought. “To be honest, I’ve no idea what it’s supposed to look like. A bunch of white stuff and some other stuff? Check!” She made a checkmark motion with her finger and moved to make sure the oven was turned on and ready for them. “I guess now we’ve just to mix it and then wait an excruciatingly long time to find out if it’s any good. We can complain about that in our cookbook.”
“Our cookbook will have jokes and games you can play while waiting for everything to cook,” he decided, passing the bowl to Alicia to have a go at mixing. “But also some recipes will have fake ingredients in them so it’s like a prank cookbook too.”
Picking up a spoon, she got to work stirring its contents as she contemplated prank ingredients in a cookbook. “You could have recipes for weird things,” she said. “Like toe-shaped cookies and doughnuts with slime filling.”
“Slime filled doughnuts that explode when you bite into them,” Fred grinned. “But also a list of legit ingredients with ground crickets thrown in to see if people really do follow recipes without questioning it.” He rummaged around his cupboards for the never used cake tin he knew his mother had given them, other rarely used kitchen utensils littering the bench until he reached the back of the cupboard and triumphantly pulled it out, sending the rest back into the cupboard in a messy pile with the flick of his wand seconds later.
Ducking into his fridge, Alicia hunted around for the butter the recipe called for and eventually emerged triumphant. “Personally speaking,” she said as she took the tins from Fred and buttered the insides as the recipe instructed. “I’d fall for it. I’ve brewed too many potions and cooked too few things, I think. I can’t be alone in blindly following whatever recipes I find. But if you used your real name, people might catch on.”
She laughed and began pouring the stirred mixture into the pans. “You have a bit of a reputation for being a prankster, for some reason.”
“An undeserved reputation, I’m perfectly innocent,” Fred claimed, unable to keep a straight face. “Can’t say I was ever good at following the instructions in potions either though. More fun to just throw whatever ingredients in and see if Snape or the cauldron exploded first. “
“I think it’d be more fun to see a cauldron explode than Snape,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him. A laugh followed closely after she’d pulled a face and after a moment more, the cakes were in the oven and baking away (at least, she hoped they were). Brushing off her hands, she turned to Fred. “So this is the wait and play games part, huh?”
“Yep. Today’s options are the Alicia tests products and doesn’t get mad when it goes wrong game, truth or dare, exploding snap with added explosions or a game of Alicia’s suggestion.”
She stroked her chin as though weighing her options for a moment before she offered, “Can we play the Alicia asks Fred uncomfortably personal questions and he has to answer game?”
“We can play the Alicia asks Fred uncomfortably personal questions and then he maybe answers them and maybe doesn’t,” Fred replied, leaning against the bench. “I don’t think it sounds as fun as the Alicia tests products game, but I did say you could choose.”
“Hmm,” she said, tapping her chin this time. “How about for every product I test, you have to answer an uncomfortable personal question?”
“Deal,” Fred accepted with a grin, always happy to find someone other than himself to test things on. “You ask first and if I avoid answering you don’t have to test anything.”
“That sounds fair,” she said, grinning as she took the spoon to scrape off some batter. She put her finger in her mouth to taste it and by the time she popped it out, she had the perfect beginner question. “Okay, so, on a scale of 1 to 10, how in love with Ang are you?”
Fred considered the question for a moment, the tips of his ears turning slightly pink despite the fact his feelings for Ang weren’t something he’d ever seen the point in hiding. “What’s the scale? Is 10 obsessed stalker love who would need a restraining order if we ever broke up or more just like would happily never break up again and wants to eventually make a fake marriage a real marriage but not any time soon because there’s plenty of time?”
“Are you basically just saying the second one’s you?” She grinned. “Because that’s super sweet and I’m totally telling her that’s what you said.”
“No, the first one’s me,” Fred joked, feeling instantly more comfortable as he did. “The second one is what I pretend to be so she doesn’t realise I’m the first.” He summoned over a box from the lounge area and pulled out a cauldron cake. “I’ve been working on expanding the skiving snackbox collection, apparently some students want to get out of classes pretty badly at the moment. Coughing cauldron cake?”
“I want it in the record that I’m the best friend ever,” Alicia said as she took the cake from him. “First, I’m not even going to call you out for blatantly lying about being a closet romantic. And second, I’m going to risk skiving off practice by taking a bite of this.”
And with that, she did. Moments later, she was doubled over in a coughing fit that gradually waned enough to resemble the cough of a truly ill student. With a final cough into her sleeve and a hoarse sound from her throat, she gave him a thumbs up. “I hope this actually wears off fast. It might be too convincing.”
“I’m working on the reversal sweet, I just haven’t got to it yet. You can blame Ang, she’s always over here distracting me,” Fred laughed, pleased at the result. “But it should wear off in an hour or so.” He looked at the bitten into cake to see how much she’d eaten. “Or maybe four. Just don’t eat any more.”
“I might blame her,” she said before coughing again. “I might also suggest that she be your next test subject. It’s only fair.”
“See, but it’s not sexy if she’s coughing all the time,” Fred replied with a shrug. “So you’re a much better guinea pig.”
“Excuse you!” But another round of coughing cut off her indignation. “You’re— She’s— I am totally sexy. You don’t have to agree. You have a girlfriend. I’m just saying.”
Having made her point, she dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. “Okay, next question: who would look better in a skirt, Rabastan Lestrange or Graham?”
Fred laughed at this question, taking his time to picture them both in a skirt. “Lestrange,” he decided. “Graham doesn't look good in anything.”
“He’d look even worse in nothing,” Alicia said, pulling a face at the unfortunate thought. With another cough, she asked, “What’s next, then?”
“Don’t ever mention Montague in nothing again,” Fred replied, his face wrinkling in disgust. “Here, try a Horny Bun,” he passed her a honey bun to try next. “Don’t worry, it won’t make you horny for Graham, should just have the same effects as a horn tongue hex.”
“Oh, no big deal. Just a horn for a tongue,” she said and warily accepted the pastry from Fred. “Please tell me you have a reversal one for this.”
“No, but a normal reversal spell should work.”
“Should work,” she echoed with a hint of doubt in her voice. But she took a bite of the honey bun. By the time she swallowed, she knew the recipe must not’ve been quite right. She coughed out a mouthful of feathers and stuck out her tongue. Her words were barely intelligible when she said, “It’s more of a bird bun I think.”
“Right. Well.” Fred attempted but failed to keep a straight face as Alicia started coughing up feathers. “That’s another product idea right there,” he said when he finally stopped laughing, casting a spell to reverse the effects of both the products she’d tested. “But I guess the Horny Buns need more work.”
Alicia let out a sigh of relief and plucked one last stray feather from her mouth. “You’re taking wheezes to a whole new level,” she said with a laugh, twirling the feather between her fingers. “Maybe you should work on it until it makes feathers shoot out of your ears or something.”
“I like the way you think,” Fred grinned, already mentally making plans. “Anyway, another question or do you think the cake is almost ready? I have plenty of other products.”
Moving for the oven, Alicia cracked open the door to peek in at the cake cooking inside. “It must be almost done,” she said. “It smells almost done anyway.”
Without waiting for a second opinion, she snatched a towel off the counter and used it to take the cake out. She set it down on the stovetop and raised her eyebrows down at the cake, which had risen over the edge of the tin and looked more like a souffle than any cake she’d ever seen.
“Um,” she said, glancing at Fred. “This is a pretty weird looking cake.”
“Yeaaah. It’s definitely not like any cake I’ve seen my mum make.” He stepped closer to it, squinting to see if that would make it look more normal. “I’m sure some icing will make it look perfect. Or we’ll just tell Ang we thought she liked weird.”
“Yeah!” she agreed, nodding emphatically. She gestured at the top of the cake and continued, “We can cover all this up with frosting! Maybe she won’t notice it’s that weird.”
“She’ll be too busy eating it and telling us how good we are at cooking to notice that it’s weird,” he agreed, deciding that if he said it with confidence that it would be true. “But maybe we should just buy frosting instead of trying to make that too...”
“That,” she said, pointing a finger at him, “is an excellent idea. We have to let it cool before we can frost it anyway.”
“Great.” Fred summoned some paper to leave a ‘DO NOT EAT’ note, in case George saw the cake and decided to try it. “Grocery store?”
"To the grocery store!” Punching a fist in the air, she announced their crusade, “To save the cake!”