The Dessert Research Club That Can't Make Tasty Desserts
"All done!"
"......."
Hmm. At this point, the fact that no alarm had gone off was the real mystery. I was starting to worry the building was just too old. Even if this was a place where Major Units lived, shouldn't there at least be a fire alarm?
"Master, how is it?"
"Hmm."
I'd started with Cinnamon because she at least had the most normal palate of the bunch. Looking at this, though, she still seemed far too dangerous. How did she manage to turn cooking into alchemy every single time?
Staring at a cookie whose interior glowed a molten red — the kind of thing that looked ready to collapse and spill lava the moment you touched it — I felt dizzy. How do you even get a cookie to have that kind of texture? Was the physics engine bugged?
"I see. I know what the problem is."
"Really!?"
"You follow the recipe, then do something completely unhinged with the parts the recipe doesn't cover."
Hadn't I specified the oven temperature and the exact time? I genuinely had no idea what she thought was "not written in the recipe."
"You add something weird on top."
"......."
What on earth do you put in a cookie to make it catch fire? Sure, if you threw something with an extremely low flash point into the oven, the heat alone could set it off, and once the cookie itself started burning, things would spiral out of control pretty fast…
"I don't think she's doing it on purpose."
"Exactly."
Not long ago I'd asked her to make a hard-boiled egg, and she'd dropped the eggs straight into boiling water and spun them around until every last one exploded. That one, I could almost forgive as ignorance. But wrapping churros in aluminum foil and sticking them in the microwave until they nearly detonated? That one still made my head spin.
"She has no common sense."
"Yeah."
She wasn't a bad kid. Her sense of taste was even the most normal of the group — the moment she tried her own cooking, she'd tear up and slam her forehead into the table. How was I supposed to fix this?
"Is Minty still the same?"
"Yeah."
I'd expected Minty to learn cooking so she could invent her own mint-chocolate combinations. Instead, she'd gone the opposite direction — only learning finished recipes that already contained mint and chocolate. Then again, she had always seemed a little distrustful of her own ideas.
Actually, that's fine by me.
Thanks to that, Minty only made delicious food now. I'd figured she was more or less handled, which was why I'd moved on to training Cinnamon. Her enthusiasm was fine. The problem was somewhere else entirely.
"You're too greedy."
"R-really? I thought doing it this way would make the cookies crispier…"
Crispier, sure. She wasn't exactly wrong. But that didn't mean anyone could eat something that was completely charred. No — charred was one thing. Whatever she'd put in there was so terrifying I couldn't bring myself to try it.
Honestly, if something looked that ruined from the outside, I wouldn't care. The real problem was all the ones that looked and smelled fine, then knocked people out cold the second they took a bite. I knew better and never touched them. Tobacco, though — the moment Cinnamon made that pitiful face, she'd eat them without hesitation, and she'd collapsed more than once.
"Tobacco, want to try this one too?"
"You trying to die?"
"H-huh… Maybe I really don't have any talent for making desserts…"
"Ahem. That's not it. You just burned it by accident. Burning things happens."
"Next time I really hope I don't burn it, so Tobacco can eat it…"
"…I hate you."
Talent? Did she seriously think she had any? We weren't trying to awaken some hidden gift in her. The goal was simply to get her to produce something — anything — that was normal.
"…What if she makes the original?"
"Huh?"
"If the only way to taste it properly is to never do anything extra… then maybe the greed itself is the problem, and she just won't do it?"
"Hmm…"
I wasn't sure about everything else, but with churros at least, that logic might hold. If the protagonist made a perfect original churro and handed her the recipe, then even if every Variation came out as a monster, the original itself might turn out normal.
"And of course, write the recipe out in as much detail as possible."
"Worth a try."
"Huh?"
"Just wait a second."
He wrote out an extremely meticulous recipe, then followed it to the letter and produced a batch of churros. He fed them to Cinnamon, zeroed in on the exact flavor she considered the ultimate original churro, and refined the recipe to match.
"You know that adding anything throws off the balance, right?"
"Yes!"
Until now, even when the balance was off, she'd still add things hoping for something tastier. But what she wanted to make this time was something where killing that balance was itself a mistake — and she understood that. He'd also packed the recipe with every scrap of common-sense guidance she might get confused about.
…Well, I did crib a fair amount of it from my own memories.
I couldn't recall the exact details, but there had been an episode about successfully making ordinary churros. Not main story — official SD comic, I think. It even ended with Tobacco relaxing over a successful batch, only to get knocked out cold by a Variation churro. Perfect source material.
"S-so? How is it?"
"From what I saw while watching, she didn't do anything weird."
"The smell and the shape look perfect too."
Since I couldn't risk eating it first if something went wrong, I had Tobacco try it. Only after watching her eyes go wide and hearing her say it was delicious did I follow suit. Hmm. The reproduction rate on this was absurdly high.
"When you follow the recipe, it turns out this good."
"R-really?"
"So why do you keep putting weird stuff in?"
"…I don't know. Before I even think about sticking to the recipe, my hands just move the second I decide something would be better…"
Did she have a culinary terrorism instinct hardwired into her body? Anyway, at this level she could at least manage a very limited range of desserts. Problem solved.
…It felt a little half-baked, but I honestly had no confidence I could fix the root cause.
"Is this really enough…?"
"Not enough on its own. We'll need to expand the list of dishes she can make as pure originals."
"Ahh."
"But even just this is huge growth, if you ask me."
"Really?"
"Those churros we sold at the booth last time would have tasted so much better if they'd just been freshly fried and still warm like this."
"Ahh."
A massive leap forward, really. Someone who couldn't do anything at all had learned to do one thing properly.
"Thank you for teaching me, Chef!"
"Mm."
Everyone's affection grinding is coming along nicely.
The actual affection numbers could be handled with items. But stacking up this kind of genuine gratitude first would make them much easier to put to work later. They were hopeless at making desserts, but their combat performance was rock-solid.
Minty's a human-rights-tier buffer, sure, but…
The next Deadly Battle featured Nepenthes, a giant plant boss. Clearing it required this guild's members as mandatory picks. Gourmand and Cinnamon in particular were non-negotiable hires.
I can half-ass the stat upgrades, but the real problem is that I have to put them in the party at all.
Cinnamon, at least, should accept a summons from her cooking teacher after how well this had gone. That left Gourmand.
"Teacher, no matter how I look at it, this just isn't right."
"......."
"I want to make desserts. If it's not sweet enough, it's not a dessert."
She was genuinely insane, which made her a nightmare to deal with. At first, the sheer gulf in cooking quality had kept her obedient. But the longer I kept teaching her normal food, the more she insisted it needed to be sweeter — and the more her pathological side came out.
"If you make it that sweet, it gets greasy and clashes."
"But then I don't get the feeling of eating dessert while I'm eating a meal!"
Why would you need that feeling? She might have been the strongest villain in this entire game. Even telling her to just make a giant dessert and eat it like a meal didn't work.
"There's a meal stomach and a dessert stomach, right? I want to fill my meal stomach with dessert!"
Those are not separate things, you absolute blockhead. I was seriously tempted to just unlock her, dump Choco into her, and brainwash her with Affection Gifts. She seemed like the type who could take a beating from those gifts and still be fine.
"You're putting pizza toppings in a fish-shaped pastry to make pizza taiyaki? That's not sweet enough. Can't we mix in red bean paste?"
"Hmm… If we add honey and make it a gorgonzola-style pizza, that might work?"
"No, that's still not enough. At the end of the day, it just tastes like pizza."
Why does a pizza-flavored taiyaki need to taste like something else? This was the same girl who'd made the old mint-chocolate-cheese-katsu. She was the devil incarnate…
I was starting to think I should just drop her and find a way to clear the raid with other characters.
I only need to find one thing that works.
If I could just find some common ground, her trust in us would go up. Most of what she loved and pushed for was a mashup of regular food and dessert flavors — the kind of taste where you couldn't tell what you were even eating.
"Oh?"
"Hm?"
"Master, I think I've got it."
Something had clicked. The inspiration had come from the new mint-chocolate-cheese-katsu currently in my mouth, of all things — but this might actually work.
"Fried ice cream."
"Huh?"
Ice cream was a sweet dessert, but the outer texture was pure ordinary fried food. That alone might not be enough, but if we put it on skewers and alternated it with regular fried pieces… You could enjoy the taste of normal food and dessert at the same time, and it would still feel like you were eating a proper meal.
"…So this skewer is the dish you're teaching me today?"
"Yeah."
"Try one. Before it gets soggy."
She started eating with a half-skeptical look, clearly wondering how a skewer that looked like ordinary fried food was supposed to be a dessert. But every time she bit into one of the fried ice cream pieces nestled in between, she couldn't hide the way her expression went soft and melted. I'd eaten plenty of them during testing myself — they really did taste that good.
"This is…"
"It tastes good even to a normal palate."
"R-really?"
"Have you ever seen me lie?"
"…You never do."
Gourmand, still working through the fried ice cream skewers, suddenly started crying. She listed off every culinary terrorism incident she'd ever caused, then poured out the grief she'd been carrying — how the path she wanted had always been rejected, how she'd given up on ever being acknowledged.
The reason she'd followed Minty into this club, she said, was because Minty would happily declare that anything with mint chocolate in it was delicious. Minty had been the only person who ever accepted her.
…I've never seen this story before.
What is this?