One piece ONE SHOTS

Day 9

Robin

~{You're point of view}~

It's was the annual cooking competition which is televised each year, it's always before Christmas and everyone loves to watch it and see everyone make their own food for the show.

Each year, everyone who joins the competition will be told what to recreate, but you're allowed to make you're own twist to it. The prize is obviously money, like any competition that's televised.

I was lucky enough to be able to join in this year as contestant and not someone who's watching the show. I'm so excited right now, I want to prove myself to everyone and show how good I am with cooking!

So here I am on stage with a pretty good amount of contestants this year, ready to be told what to recreate.

-"Hello and welcome everyone! Here are our new contestants this year, this year we we're able to get the double amount of contestants and here's the reason why! Our marvelous judges, wanted to have a twist to change things up! So they have decided to have everyone pared up by a partner by random and see how they'll cook!" My stomach dropped at the pit of mu stomach once I hear everything the announcer says. I'm going to be paired up with someone? Someone who I do not know? Oh god this'll go really bad.

-"And for the prize money we have decided to also double that amount so the two contestants that are paired up and win the prize will be able to split the money!" Right, the prize money. To be honest I don't really care about the prize money, but at least they took that into consideration.

-"As for the food creation's, you may pick anything you want to make, but I must be a desert and the desert must either be a cake, a pie, or some cookies that are different than you're usual store bought ones!" Well, that's going to be interesting with negotiation with some of the groups.

-"Now for the real fun to begin! The partners you're going to join up with is quite simple, you're all going to grab a piece of paper in this box here, the number on the paper will be who you're partnered up with. Once you obtain your paper wait to find your partner with the same number on the paper! Have fun!" Once the lady announces the rules for the partnership we're going to have to do, she then takes a white box and places it on a table and lets everyone to go and grab their paper.

Once I get my paper I look at the number to see whom I got. I got number "9".

I stare at my paper for while before someone accidently bumps into me which ends up making me crash right into another person. It was like we were a bunch of dominoes falling all together. 

I realized that a lot of people seem to be falling quite often and having already fallen once, I think it was best to pick myself back up from the ground and get myself away from the crown as much as I can. Everyone look so huddled together like a pack of penguins trying to stay warm during the winter. I sight, at least I was able to get out of the huddle as fast as I could, it was quite suffocating already. I mean a bunch of people in a giant huddle trying to find their partner, which pretty much felt like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

While the minutes go by and the number of people without a partner is very little, I spot a lady also trying to stay away from the crowd and reading a book. She seems to have a piece of paper that has a number on it, but from my angle I didn't get the chance to see it. I shrug. I mean might as well talk to her and find out.

I slowly walk towards her as she flips through the pages of her book. 

-"Hello." I say once I finally approach her. She looks over her book to look towards me, she smiles kindly while setting her book down and closing it.

-"Hello. Can I help you with something?" Gosh her voice is beautiful too!

-"I was just wondering what your number was, as I was just curious." She chuckles a bit until she lifts up her piece of paper to show the big bold black number written on it.

-"My number's 9. You?" I was surprised by how easily I found my partner

-"Wow! My god, I mean that's my number too, but holy cow that was easy to find you." The lady chuckles again.

-"Well shall we get started with the baking?"

-"Yes! but first we need to plan things beforehand, like do you have something already in mind for baking?"

-"Hmm, that's a good question. In my opinion I not so fond of sweet things."

-"Well what do you like?"

-"Anything that goes with coffee. Does that help?"

-"Sure it does! We can make a cake that ha coffee inside. I know a pretty good cake myself!" She chuckles again and getting up from her seat.

-"Alright then, we shall do that." She smiles brightly.

-"Alright then! What's your name by the way?"

-"Robin. You?"

-"(Y/n)!" 

By now you probably know what's going to happen, but of course we go and find a station that's free for us to bake on, I go grab the ingredients as Robin does the prepping.

We start off with making the cinnamon crumb mixture first as we need tp refrigerate it before making the cake batter. 

To start off the cinnamon crumb mixture we first start off by combining the brown sugar, flour, and cinnamon together in a medium bowl. We then put in some really cold butter in the mixture and mush it together until they are all looking like a bunch of crumbs, we then put it inside the freezer so it's super cold.

Once we finished with that we then move onto the cake batter, we whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a large bowl and set it aside to move onto the mixer to beat the butter and sugar together until it's smooth and creamy. After that we add the eggs and vanilla and mix it again. Then we beat the sour cream inside which will make this batter a bit lumpy. 

We then add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients together and finally, beat in the milk in the mixture, we made sure not to over mix this part either. With the milk added it made the mixture much thicker. 

Once finished with the batter we take out our greased pan for this and add the batter to then take out the crumbs we made from the freezer and sprinkle a part of it on the batter, this will be used as the middle part, we then put the remaining batter on top of the crumbs. 

We made a bit of a mess with the batter but this could be easily cleaned up, we smooth the batter with a spatula and then add the rest of the crumbs on top of the cake batter. Once we finally finished with the cake batter we chuck it in the oven to then move onto the icing of the cake while it bakes and cools off. 

The icing part is pretty simple like any other icing, all we have to do is whisk the confectioners' sugar, 2 Tablespoons milk, and vanilla extract together. We noticed that our icing was still a little too thick so we added a little bit more milk to it. We also added a pinch of salt to make it not so sweet.

We then take out the cake and let it cool off, this is where we had to wait a little which made it perfect for starting a conversation with Robin. It was nice, she's a very calm lady and she's also very knowledgeable, which was fun to listen to her stories and facts. I noticed a lot of people doing very different types of deserts like someone is literally making cotton candy? It was quite funny to watch everyone doing their own thing that represents them.

Once the cake finally cooled off we drizzled the icing on top and the cake was finished and could be served.

The judges like ours, but we didn't get anything else. They did enjoy how it wasn't so sweet as we tried not to add so much sugar inside. Robin seemed to enjoy the cake though as we ate it, so it's still a win for us.

-End-