A/N: This is my Secret Santa contribution for 2016 for Argentis, who asked for: "Incarnation: TAG. Virgil Tracy + Pavlova. Medium: Anything."This was organised by Artistic Rainey over on tumblr. Such a great thing!
Argentis, I'm so incredibly sorry it's taken me this long to get your gift completed. My life in RL has been unbelievably hectic and stressful to the extreme this holiday season, but I needed something to keep my brain moving, and this was it. It was a wonderful prompt to work with, and sent me off on several different tangents and research paths to work out how I wanted to approach it, so I really hope you enjoy reading it. Happy Belated Christmas all, and especially to Argentis. I hope you're all having a wonderful start to the new year.
Thanks for reading!
He'd heard a rescuee talking about them on a mission, five days into December, on a course to prevent a large yacht from sinking in a storm at the outer edges of Port Phillip Bay, and he thought it was pretty cool-sounding. A dessert made of meringue, chocolate, mint and kiwifruit sounded pretty colourful to say the least, not to mention delicious. The name, he mused, sounded familiar, at any rate, even if he'd prefer much more berries and tropical fruit with it, thanks very much.
There was a supply run for the Christmas season not long after that; Grandma liked having all her ducks in a row long before December 25th, so Virgil offered to go with her in the intention of finding the ingredients in his internet-pilfered recipe to try it out, with the ability to start again if the damned automated module ate it like he had a sneaking suspicion it would, before he managed to get the dessert right. Contrary to popular belief (or just in their subsequent comparison of his skills to that of Grandma Tracy), Virgil wasn't that great at cooking and baking, even if Alan (with his preternatural senses for knowing when it wasn't Grandma in the kitchen) certainly thought so.
He'd never actually made meringue before, despite Gordon's eager support of his supposed prowess, let alone meringue with cream that needed to be spread across the top of it… That was the easy part.
The reason why he was wary was because any contact he'd had with the electric mixer or other cooking utensils of the kind before now had involved him pulling it apart to see how it worked, rather than actually getting any experience in using the thing, so he was a little wary as to how it was going to turn out, especially as he was going to be using the Automated Kitchen Module, rather than the 392℉ oven that the recipe specified. The machine, new to the appliance market as it was, combined with the first-time experiment this adventure was, Virgil had to concede that it was going to be interesting.
Said recipe itself, Virgil found, in his off-tangent research into why the dessert sounded so familiar - when he saw pictures of the finished product before he even dared start making it - brought back memories of a Christmas when he was small, before Mom had passed away and they'd gone on one of their few family holidays overseas to visit Jeff's youngest brother and his wife in Melbourne. Virgil now recalled thoroughly enjoying licking the whipped cream off his own fingers, and watching an even younger Gordon - somewhere in the years between the kid's third birthday and Alan's birth a couple years later - attempt to fling a spoonful of his across the table at Scott, much to their father's and aunt's displeasure.
The pavlova dessert, Virgil discovered, had no actually trackable regional or geographic origin. Some sources had it coming to the US as a german torte, the other, more widely accepted conclusion was that of the legendary squabble between Australia and New Zealand over the 'invention' of the specific dessert, one with official numbers over recipe variations sitting somewhere around the 650-70 mark. His eyebrows had risen exponentially at that revelation, courtesy of a researcher from sometime in the early 2000s at the University of Otago in Aotearoa, but on the other hand, he wasn't surprised. One of his areas of independent interest at MIT had been a series of essays, specifically related to engineering, but with references to a myriad of other obscure topics on the proliferation of how different regional disparities had a habit of having multiple places of divergence, so he had just shaken his head and moved on.
##
Once he'd chivvied both Grandma and Scott out of the kitchen; his grandmother and eldest brother wanting to 'help', and prevent Grandma from helping, respectively - plus threatening to kick Gordon's ass if he tried to do a switcheroo with his ingredients again thank you, crutches or not you moron - Virgil finally had the Module set with the appropriate cooking temperature, and had (pretty intuitively, he was pleased to announce, even to himself) gotten the mixer working with as much ease as he'd done with the test runs of his ion screwdriver.
Meringues were tricky. He came to that conclusion pretty quickly. The main technique involved gestures that had a lot of 'folding in' of the beaten cornflour, cream of tartar and egg-whites with the vanilla and sugar to make sure that he didn't accidentally beat all of the air out of the stuff before he spooned it onto his grease-papered baking tray. Unfortunately, his first attempt, despite being as careful as he possibly could've been to not have gone and dropped the entire mixture onto the tray into a blob, after an hour and a half of cooking (and shooing frustrating siblings, Kayo included from the kitchen) proved to be nothing more than a mushy, burned mess, running across the edges of the tray and fouling the Module so the whole kitchen somehow stank like burned sugar. Wonderful.
Take two turned out somewhat better, the mess somewhat more confined to the edges of the tray, and the top just a little less burned since he'd dialed down the Module settings a bit, figuring that the heating element was a little too intense for the delicate structure of the meringue. Virgil examined it critically as he cleaned the bowl this time around and did a general tidy-up, and got the mixer set up again in order to whip the cream and gauge how many berries he wanted to stick on top of this thing - and whether he'd gotten too many mangoes, seeing as no one else in the family actually liked the things aside from him. He then decided that the second time was better than the mess that the first had turned out to be, so be it if it tasted funky. He left the door open as he let it cool down entirely, and decided that if his family didn't like it, despite their continued interest in his project - go away John, I mean it, unless it's an emergency, no! - he'd just eat it himself. More blueberries for him. He grinned.
##
Virgil's plan and what seemed to be his enjoyment of the entire experience went kind of kaput when it came to take it out of the module. His thickened cream was in a bowl on the counter, ready to dollop and his fresh fruit and passionfruit pulp all ready to set out in a pattern he'd drawn up, but to his absolute frustration (and no lack of a vehement kind of under-the-breath swearing) it wasn't until it had slid off his tray and onto his once-black boots and the shiny wooden flooring that he realised that he'd forgotten to wipe the excess grease off the tray before he'd added the new lot of paper to it, and the whole pavlova base, from the bottom up and all the way through the middle had no friction to stick to the metal, resulting in the associated death plunge to the floor.
Damn.
Sighing, he bent on his knees with the spatula, the trashcan and his paper towelling, and set to cleaning up mess No. 2… Third time lucky? He wondered. Perhaps...
##
Take three, post-mixing found Virgil standing with his arms crossed at the kitchen bench - streaks of powder and egg in his hair and across his face from his angry frustration at how nothing was going right; I'm following the recipe, how hard is this supposed to be?
Lip pulled between his teeth in concentration as his eyes flickered from the mixture in the bowl to the recipe print-out, to the cleaned and prepared and ready baking tray once more, he glared pointedly at the stupid thing, just daring something to go wrong this time. Normally known as patient and mild-mannered, for some reason, probably to do with his annoyance at this mess just not working for him, even when he actually expected it, it was making him even more irritated in the process. This time, the engineer thought grimly, he was going to throw it at the wall, see if creating a baking-mix mural was going to be a better use of his time than this.
He was just about to take the plunge and dab the concoction on the tray once more, when Brains arrived, data pad in hand, nearly walking straight through Virgil's un-mopped floor, near the nook without even an upwards glance until his feet suddenly slid a little.
Virgil looked up as the older man blinked twice as he registered the white mess that now, despite Virgil's cleaning, seemed to take over every other available surface, from Virgil's hair and face as aforementioned, the counter top, the front of the module, the floor, the sink and everything in between, and Brains' brown eyes narrowed behind his spectacles.
"V-Virgil," He queried, frowning. "W-what are you doing?"
Virgil looked around and seemed to register just what a state he was in before looking back at Brains. "I was attempting to bake," he replied quietly. "And I guess I use bake in the loosest sense of the word."
Brains looked around, looking for a clean surface to place his data pad down. "Uh, one moment," he said, retreating to the other side of the room. He deposited the pad before returning. "Alright, Virgil, what were you attempting to, uh, bake?"
"A pavlova," Virgil responded. "I just can't understand where I keep going wrong. This is my third attempt."
"Hmm," Brains murmured thoughtfully and looked over at the implements on the counter. He pointed at the lined tray. "Is that what you've been putting the m-mixture in to bake?"
"Yeah, I lined the tin and everything but I can't understand why it's coming out so greasy."
"Uh, perhaps because you've, uh, lined the tray with the wrong p-paper," he said, taking the bowl of mixture out of his hands and putting it down.
Virgil let him and huffed in frustration. "I didn't realise there was a wrong sort," he mumbled. "What's the right sort?"
"Baking paper," Brains replied, heading over to the cupboard to get it for him.
"Oh," Virgil said, taking it from him. "Thanks." He looked at the box. "I didn't even see this in there."
Brains smiled kindly at him. "It's an easy mistake," he pointed out. "D-do you want some help?"
"To be honest, I won't say no." He took the paper from the tray and replaced it with the baking paper Brains had given him, then refilled the tray again.
Brains took it from him and put it into the module, adjusting the temperature. "Alright, there you go, we'll, uh, check on it again later."
"Why did you turn the thermostat down?" Virgil asked, pointing at the controls.
"You're supposed to preheat the m-module then turn it down for baking."
"Oh, so that's why it looked better the second time round."
"Yes," Brains smiled. "I-indeed."
##
"Virgil, this tastes… awesome!" Alan cried enthusiastically, as he shoved his dessert spoon in his mouth at lunch on Christmas Day. Thankfully there had been no early-morning call-outs, and while Dad was still regrettably absent, and they couldn't count on the record lasting for the remainder of the day as well, they had all just been glad they'd at least been able to sit down for lunch together. It'd been a great morning of present exchanges and good wishes shared between them, Virgil thought. He personally had some new oil paints that his grandmother had bought him that he was eager to try out at some point... "I told you you could do it bro!"
"Too right, Virg!" Gordon nodded, licking his lips and his fingers of cream and smirking. "It's really tasty." John, with his Christmas hat perched on his head, and breaking up his mint crisp chocolate on top of his slice, and Scott, with his mouth full of blueberries - the ass had swiped almost all of the ones in the vicinity of his slice - nodded as well.
"It has certainly turned out very well, Virgil." Grandma Tracy said. "I'd have thought I'd be helping you to fix up any boo-boos." She smiled. "I'm glad to see that I've been very much mistaken."
"I remember this from when we were kids," John said wistfully. Scott looked thoughtful.
"I thought I recognised the taste," The oldest brother picked up a berry, examining it with bright blue eyes, before he popped it into his mouth and closing them as he munched. "Mmmmm."
Virgil grinned wryly, rolling his eyes at Scott's overdramatics. "Well, I had Brains to help with that." He said, gesturing to the engineer, suspiciously quiet in all the excitement since he'd set the pavlova in the middle of the dining table. "This is actually my third attempt." He tipped his head at Kayo, who had been eyeing him suspiciously up until this point, a smile of her own playing across her lips. "He was most helpful with telling me the things that I'd done wrong…" If he were any less, ahem... mature, he'd have stuck his tongue out at her by now. He knew that look!
"Thank you, V-Virgil," Brains said softly, smiling in slight embarrassment. "Y-you did all the hard work!" He insisted. "I just gave you some p-pointers!"
"In any case, it tastes great." Scott said decisively, raising his glass for another toast (the first having been for Mom and Dad and Grandpa). Virgil looked at him, startled, as clearly a little confused, the others followed suit. "To Brains and Virgil," Scott said proudly. "For a wonderful dessert, and for three attempts for making it a Christmas worth remembering!"
"Merry Christmas!"
They all cheered, and Virgil smiled. Mission accomplished.
(Also, a huge thanks to my friend Kelly, for giving me some much-needed help with a sticky bit in the middle! Love you hun. 3)