After a long glance through the kitchen doorway, I sneak a spoonful of frosting. It's so sweet, it nearly makes me gag, but I savor every drop anyway.
Being a baker's son seems great to everyone else. In theory, I should wake up to fresh-baked muffins each morning and come home to cookies and pastries every afternoon. In reality however, I grab a stale slice of baguette for breakfast and steal a spoonful of cookie dough or frosting once a month or so.
Our kitchen receives two shipments per week. One is the ration grain and basic necessities for a bakery to operate up to District Twelve standards. The other is a load of supplies to make our share of the baked goods for the Capitol. Juicy, ripe blueberries for muffins, rich chocolate chunks for pain au chocolat, hundred pound bags of caster sugar, blocks of real sweet cream butter ... my mouth waters at the image, and I return to the cake in front of me.
The Capitol knows exactly how much of each item we need to fill our quota, so the measurements we get have been precisely measured, every cup of sugar and teaspoon of vanilla extract accounted for. Occasionally a tart gets too brown, and my dad has to write up a slew of paperwork to account for the loss, but then we get to divide it as a family and eat it. One time-after a long sugarless drought- I screwed up the words on a small layer cake. It was supposed to read "It's Reaping Day!", but I made it say "It's Raping Day!" just so it would be rejected, and we could indulge. I'll never forget the look on my mother's face when she began to pack it away for shipment.
"Peeta! Peeta Mellark! How could you do such a thing? You did this on purpose, I bet. Just wait until your father sees what you've done," she said and stormed off. My dad didn't care, though. He just read it and winked at me as he turned to fill out the loss form.
The only other time I deliberately sabotaged food in the kitchen was that rainy day five years ago. Five? Maybe it's six now. The day I burned the bread.
She was so thin. I couldn't stand it. She had sat in school for weeks looking miserable, cheeks drawn and face pale. I couldn't tell at first whether it was the grief of losing her father or something else. But it didn't take very many weeks to realize it. Her family was starving. She was starving. Katniss.
If the girl you loved was hungry, and all you had to do was burn a little bread, wouldn't you? How could I not?