"Alright, I think we have everything we need." Hunk stood behind the kitchen island with his hands on his hips. In front of him were all sorts of ingredients, all ranging in colors and textures. He peered at them as he checked off his mental recipe list and gave a nod. "Okay, let's get started."
On the other side of the counter Allura picked up one of the jars and examined the purple jelly-like substance inside before looking back at Hunk. "Where did you get all of these ingredients? And what are they?"
"I've been collecting them from all of the planets we've visited. Honestly, I don't really know what they are, but I do know that they taste good." Hunk picked up something that looked like a bowl of pink clouds. "This stuff tastes a lot like sugar."
"Sugar…?" Allura raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Hunk had been cooking for them for a good number of months now, and nothing he had made yet had tasted bad. She had assumed he had been using the ingredients in the pantry that the ship mashed together into food goo, but apparently he had been building up a rather large arsenal of…unknown edibles. Recently, after dinner he had been serving what he called "dessert" which consisted of absolutely delectable little "pastries" as he called them. She had fallen in love with them, and had insisted that Hunk teach her how he made them. He had seemed overjoyed to have someone else in the kitchen with him, but now she was feeling a little overwhelmed.
"Yeah, sugar is what we use on Earth to make everything sweet." Hunk gathered a large and a small bowl and set them in front of her. "Didn't you guys have sweets on Altea?"
"Altean food is primarily based on nutritional value." Allura watched as he brought out little measuring cups and spoons. This seemed like a fairly complicated process compared to what she was used to. "The 'food goo', as you Paladin's call it, is an example of a well-balanced, nutritional Altean meal. Taste and appearance are unnecessary qualities. I mean, of course it has to be edible or no one would want to eat, but it isn't a primary concern. Your desserts taste like nothing I've ever had before, if that is how you define 'sweet'."
"So I'll take that as a no. Okay then, we're going to start slow. We're going to make some sugar cookies." A smile spread across his face. "Sugar cookies are great because you can cut them into whatever shapes you want and then decorate them with icing. Don't worry, I've perfected the recipe so they won't come out like those scaultrite cookies the other day."
She chuckled lightly at that and rolled up her sleeves. "Alright, where do I start?"
He pushed towards her the smaller bowl. "Okay, we're going to mix the dry ingredients. On Earth, this would be flour, baking powder and baking soda. Since we don't have those here, I've been working on finding the closest things to it."
He held up a little tiny vial of light green liquid. "This stuff is the closest to flour I've found yet. We need 2 and 3/4 cups of flour."
"Okay." Allura took the measuring cups and looked at them inquisitively. They were handmade to be the appropriate size and by his guidance she held out the largest one. He opened up the vial and very carefully dropped a single droplet of the liquid into the cup. Once it hit the bottom it immediately expanded into fluffy green granules, filling the cup almost instantly. Fascinating.
"How long did it take you to find the right combination to make these sugar cookies?" She continued to follow his guidance, pouring the dry ingredients into the small bowl, reveling at their unusual qualities. She stirred them together and once blended they turned a soft blue color.
"It took a lot of trial and error and a lot of eating bad cookies." Hunk made a disgusted face at the memory. "After the first round or two the others stopped helping me taste test."
"After your scaultrite cookies, I can see why." She laughed.
"Hey, they came in handy." He defended. "Besides, every failure helps me learn more about all these new ingredients so it's not all bad."
In the large bowl they began to mix the wet ingredients, which were even more odd than the dry ones. The purple jelly acted as butter and when it touched the pink sugar clouds, they turned into a liquid which she stirred until it was a smooth and thick. Then he used a few drops of some red extract, which he stated tastes as close to vanilla as he could get so far, and last, and quite possibly the only relatively normal item they had, was an egg with a maroon colored yolk.
Allura worked on mixing it all together, watching it as it all turned a soft pink color. It was really quite amazing to see such a clear reaction by combining different ingredients. She wouldn't have had the patience to experiment with all these weird and unknown things. What if they had been poisonous? "How did you learn to cook?"
"My mom." He wiped down the counter before dropping a single drop of the flour-liquid on it and spreading it out. "She taught me everything I know. She used to work long hours, so when she would come home we would cook dinner together every night. It was a lot of fun, but I can never make anything taste as good as she did."
The memory brought a smile to his face and she reflected it. Often she tended to forget that the Paladins were still very young, just like her, and they had a family out there still. One that they likely wanted to get back to someday. "Did your father not cook with you as well?"
"Well, my mom raised me on her own, so my dad wasn't in the picture much. Which is fine." he added quickly when she gave him a slightly perturbed look. "My mom did a really great job raising me. So I didn't need a dad around."
"I see…" She began gradually mixing the wet and dry ingredients together. "I suppose my upbringing was the opposite. My mother passed when I was fairly young, so It was just me and my father."
"Yeah, so you know, it's really not that bad being raised by a single parent. They work twice as hard for you, so I always felt like it was like she loved me twice as much." He grinned, and that smile said that he absolutely believed that. "I hope that we can defeat Zarkon soon so I can go back to Earth and make sure she's doing okay."
"Yes…" Those words made her a touch sad. She had to admit she was a bit jealous that he could dream of seeing his mother again. Sadly, it wasn't an achievable reality for her.
He noticed her change in demeanor and aimed for a distraction. "Okay, now we have to roll it out on the counter and then we can cut the shapes."
She dumped the now solid, lavender ball of dough onto the spot he had laid flour out on the counter and he handed her a rolling pin. She got to work on rolling out the dough as Hunk prepped the pans and set the oven. He threw out ideas of what shapes they should make and she laughed when he mentioned things like "Coran's Mustache" and "Keith's Mullet" as possible shapes. It wasn't long before they were cutting Paladin helmets, lions, and bayards out of dough. Hunk attempted to shape ones to look like Lance and Shiro, but they came out looking horribly mutated, which sent them both into fits of laughter.
As the cookies baked, Hunk guided Allura on making the icing in various colors, and spooning them into bags so that they could be piped on top of the cookies. The smell of the baking sweets was enough to make her mouth water. Why didn't Altean food smell this good?
She waited impatiently for the cookies to cool once they were done baking, and while they waited Hunk told her about the plethora of sweets they could make. Cakes, doughnuts, cheesecakes, ice cream, eclairs, napoleons, macaroons; his list seemed endless. His expressions were so animated when he spoke of them that she wished she knew what they tasted like now.
"Now for the fun part. Decorating." Hunk laid out the cookies neatly on a cooling rack, and once baked they were a soft lavender in color. He handed her a bag of icing. It wasn't easy at first, and she frowned as her string of icing refused to follow the line she wanted. She ended up making the green lion nothing but a messy green blob. She was determined to improve.
Hunk made just as many mistakes, focusing hard on icing the cutout of Coran's head. The icing got all squiggly and made his mustache take up most of his face and Allura giggled at the mistake.
Together, they iced every cookie, occasionally bursting into laughter at the ridiculous results that the uncooperative icing caused. By the end they had icing all over both the table and on their hands and faces. Hunk cheered her on as she focused intensely on making at least one cookie look perfect, and she succeeded on the cookie of the blue lion. She showed it off with such pride that when Lance threatened to eat it, she about took his hand off.
She looked at Hunk with a large, gleaming smile. It was a smile like his mothers; warm and cheerful and contagious. "Hunk, will you teach me to make more sweets?"
He laughed. "Of course, Princess."