The Problem With Burnt Cookies

5. Cinnamon

Maisy

The stench from the kitchen was so strong it gave her a headache, two days in and Maisy was already debating on kicking Rhys out.

She typed on her cell phone and sent a message to Rhys

"How much vanilla did you put in the cake?"

"A little more than the recipe asked."

"It's a lot."

Sighing as she headed to the source of the overwhelming scent of vanilla choking her sense of smell, heading to the stairs to go down into the kitchen.

"It's not like there's such thing as too much vanilla... It is a vanilla sponge cake." he texted her back.

She walked into the room to see the table covered in flour and sugar, the stove boiling over with the strawberry preserves, and Rhys pouring straight vanilla extract onto the baked cake she had set aside to teach him to decorate with.

Rhys winced, for a sponge cake, he wasn't sure how any baker stood with soaking the cake to make it spongey. It smelled like pure alcohol, not that he would omplain about a rum cake right now...

Rhys looked up at Maisy, seeing her look around the room in horror, then at his hand as he finished the bottle of vanilla. Maisy stormed over to the stove yanking the pot she had off of it, and gesturing to it, he peered into the pot she held, the strawberries scalded to the bottom, almos burnt.

He frowned, he'd genuinely thought if he'd left it itd be fine. Maisy grabbed her pencil and paper from her apron, writing furiously onto it.

"You didnt think to stir it?" She wrote.

"No. You never asked."

She slammed the table, turns out, based on what Spencer told me earlier, its how the deaf community got people's attention, but Maisy probably did it out of frustration of how poorly he was doing. She wrote down again, her cheeks flaming in frustration at working with this pain in her ass.

"What's this?" he read aloud, "You told me you wanted to do a sponge cake. Sponges soak up liquids..." He wrote back to her.

"It was already a sponge, because of its texture!" She wrote, underlining texture three times, as she threw her hands up, grabbed the ruined cake, tossed it into the half-filled garbage bin, and walked into the freezer, standing on her tiptoes to reach something.

Rhys followed her, seeing her struggle to reach a cake, as he shook his head, she was an annoying one at that. There was a reason he stuck to cooking, and not baking, it was too reliant on creativity, too much room for error. Not to mention that they spent a couple of weeks since their pact getting each part of the baking right. But this woman was sent from Baking Hell... She was stubborn, huffing in annoyance was her favorite pastime when he made everything precise wanting to do this as right as possible, as well as signing what he now learned meant "idiot" in sign language, thanks to Diana. When Rhys tapped Maisy's shoulder motioning her to scoot over as he got the round sheets of cake she wanted, handing them to her as she cocked her head to the side, and shook her head, grabbing them and flicking the lights, motioning to him to follow him.

He followed her, and she got a tub of icing and the caramel peanut nougat filling that she had made earlier, and wrote on a notepad, handing him a spatula.

"Show me how to assemble and dirty ice this." she wrote.

Rhys snorted, shaking his head as he did the easier task of assembling the first layer of cake from centering where the outer part was and putting the filling in the middle, careful not to get it on his skin, he had his epi in his backpack, but it was in the car. Based on her short legs, Rhys wasn't sure she'd make it in time before he died of anaphylactic shock on the flour-covered floor.