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With Steve, he never halfways anything: he’s either amazing at something, or fantastically terrible. He can’t make toast, or bread, or anything normal and essential to living, but he can cook a cheesecake and five dozen cookies sweet enough to give you shivers.
“These cookies could solve wars, I am completely serious,” Natasha says through a mouthful of chocolate chip cookies. Tony steals two out of the five she’s holding in her right hand; her glare doesn’t faze him. Clint steals one out of her left hand, which earns a kick to the shins, and an equally unfazed look. But Tony and Clint have sweet teeth (and God only knows what Nat likes); even Bruce likes Steve’s sweets, and Bruce has the single blandest taste palette in history.
Steve making desserts is practically a national holiday, only the nation is just Avengers tower and the holiday is every Friday night. He’s tried to make regular food, but somehow it always goes wrong. Dramatically, spectacularly wrong. He poached eggs once, and instead of looking vaguely like whipped cream it looked more like it’d been soaked in vinegar for a few days. It even bounced.
It’s only sweets Steve can make; everything else just turns out wrong. Thankfully, however, Bucky is there to balance him out. Bucky can’t make cookies, or cake, or anything sweet, but he can make a mean steak that makes the Avengers sound like they’re having a fantastic orgy when they gather round the table for dinner.
But the sweets thing is new for them. When he and Bucky were kids, there was never enough money left over for sweet stuff; maybe sometimes Steve could make pancakes, but mostly it was Bucky making the more essential foods (lots of protein, too). Being able to cook for pleasure, and not just so they didn’t starve to death, is taking some getting used to. He’s always known Bucky was an amazing cook (he could make a can of beans taste like heaven), but this sweets thing is different. He likes it though. Bucky cooking dinner is a reminder of where they started, and Steve baking is a reminder of where they ended up.
One time the Avengers organize a bake sale, to help out veteran mental health awareness. It’s mostly a disaster; Bucky puts too much sugar in the dough so it’s unusable, then eats the entire bag of chocolate chips before Natasha can slap his hands like he’s a greedy 5 year-old. At some point, Clint’s hair ends up on fire, and Natasha has to get three new outfits because hers end up destroyed by fire and dough. In the end they just leave it to Steve to make everything—3 cakes, 60 cookies, a cheesecake, and 2 dozen cupcakes. He takes it like a champ.
Later, Bucky decides to try and bake Sam a cake for his birthday. It’s an even worse disaster than the Bake Sale Bonanza, probably because it’s just him and not the entirety of the Avengers. Half of the kitchen is covered in dough (most of it burnt and requiring deft scraping to remove), and the year-old oven ends up compleyely unusable. He yells Russian obscenities and gives up, deciding, hey, Sam likes his deviled eggs, doesn’t he? Deviled eggs it is for his birthday then. Thankfully, nobody mentions the brand-new oven that mysteriously appears in the kitchen, either.