"Wait," Gretel said, hands out as if pushing back an invisible barrier. "Wait, wait. Are you honestly seriously really telling me you've never had mille-feuille? Like, ever? At all?"
"Oh. My. God." She threw up her hands, spinning around to dramatically collapse against the shop counter conveniently within reach of her coffee, twitching pathetically to further drive the point home. The barista snickered appreciatively.
(Teenager? Ha! Gretel could totally do teenager.)
"...okay," Gretel said. She inhaled hard through her nose before pushing herself off the counter. "Okay, I'm not judging. For real, this is me not judging...not judging the unhappy sad absence of sweet, sweet puffy pastry goodness in your life. Which I'm assuming has been up to now been mostly spent in Turkish prison, a convent, or an underground banker filled with Spam. It's cool, none of us can help where we come from." She twisted the cap off her coffee and licked at the whipped cream, completely unconcerned at the risk of a scalded tongue.
"Mille-feuille, noun, transplanted French. Commonly assumed to have originally referred to a pastry made of stacked layers of baked pâte feuilletée, crème patisserie, and confiture d’abricot, and typically referred to as Napoleon, but not Neapolitan, in English. Earliest published mention supposedly found in Ali-Bab’s 1919 Gastronomie pratique, etudes culinaires suivies du Traitement de l’obésité des gourmands. Though the traditional consensus dictates that the name indicates the approximate number of layers in the pastry, in reality it's really more of a trois-feuille due to most chefs employing only three layers of awesomeness. The dessert version is filled with anything from puréed fruit, jam, sorbet, ice cream, pudding, preserves, whipped cream, flavored or unflavored custard mixed with nuts; the layers themselves vary from pâte feuilletée, tuiles cookies, baked crepes, baked brik, baked filo pastry sheets, shredded filo pastry, or wafers of tempered chocolate. As appetizers, mille-feuilles are cheesy and served warm-a-licious but nonetheless topped with sugar dust. Preferably cut with a serrated knife."
Gretel poked the whipped cream topping her coffee, licking the results off her thumb. Then she reached for the sugar.
"You want the recipe?" she asked absentmindedly, pouring a disgustingly long stream of sweet grains into her cup. "It's fairly easy if you're not wussy about pastry dough. Plus it's, like, the ultimate mix'n'match dessert; you can stick in nearly anything. It's, like, the Lego of desserts."