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World famous folk rock band “Play Not” had a YourselfCylinder channel where they shared a lot of their songs, as word famous folk rock bands tend to do, a fact which Dinadan had done his best to hide from the other two members of world famous folk rock band “Play Not”. This arrangement however, was not destined to last.
On a gloomy winter evening the duo was loitering at the fine establishment that is Lionheart Coffee Co. in the company of the world's worst bartender, Gawain Orkney, who was adding an insane amount of bubblegum flavoured whipped cream to small beignets and putting three in his mouth at a time, when a brilliant idea hit them.
“We should totally cook something together,” Iseult said, looking like someone who has just seen the Madonna, as she grabbed some of the beignets Gawain was offering her.
“Fuck yeah,” agreed Tristan, from the table where he was drawing something on a napkin that, upon close inspection, resembled a foot.
“Wait doesn’t word famous folk rock band “Play Not” have a YourselfCylinder? We could film it and post it there,” Gawain, the harbinger of disaster and destruction, concurred.
And that, dear readers, is how they ended up standing behind the isle of world famous folk rock band “Play Not”s very own kitchen, at a quarter past midnight, with Iseult acting as a camera-woman on the other side brandishing an extremely professional camera that she had unauthorizedly borrowed from her ex-boyfriend Mark, a film major, and with an array of ingredients that could most definitely not be made into actual edible food.
“Alright, ready, set, action. Or whatever it is directors say. Let’s go boys,” Iseult clapped her hand in a way that was vaguely reminiscent of a dog trainer in an agility race and started recording.
“Good morning everybody—”
“It’s a quarter past midnight,” Tristan interrupted Gawain.
“You’re right. Good afternoon everybody, as I was about to say, we are here in world famous folk rock band “Play Not”s home kitchen, with Iseult Eire and Tristan Kernow of world famous folk rock band “Play Not” fame, and we are going to bake a…” Gawain hesitated, gesturing to the ingredients in front of him, “something. We are going to bake something. I think.”
It is important to note that at that time of the “afternoon” the trio, in addition to the sugar bomb that were the beignets, had already consumed some alcohol, namely bubblegum flavoured jello shots provided by Gawain, who, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone except maybe himself, had decided to consume as many bubblegum flavoured things as he could for a week. So, they were not exactly sound of mind, although that does not make them blameless in regards to the events that follow, as Dinadan angrily pointed out afterwards.
“Whatever it is that we’re doing, we need eggs. That’s one of the main things I’ve learned while living with Dinadan. Eggs are useful in food. So, eggs.”
“Splendid. I know nothing about cooking so I believe you. Now, where are the eggs?” Gawain asked.
“Top right cupboard,” intervened Iseult, who, despite actually being a decent cook, was rather enjoying the show and had no intentions to stop the trainwreck coming.
“Thank you. Why is there vodka next to the eggs?”
“Oh no, that’s just Schweppes,” said Tristan nonchalantly.
“Schweppes.”
“Yeah, Schweppes. The vodka’s in the Schweppes bottle.”
“Well, that makes sense. Moving on, I think we should bake a cake.”
“Do you know how to bake a cake?”
“No, but it doesn’t look that hard when Kay does it,” Gawain said, with a confidence that reeked of hubris, possibly the worst crime of all (and sexiest, according to everyone who ever read about Greek mythology). Iseult snickered, her face filled with a glee that only watching cat fails compilations can bring.
Gawain and Tristan got to work, gathering on the kitchen counter what they thought was useful for cake baking, and that is a dish, several eggs, flour, yeast, rainbow sprinkles, bubblegum flavoured whipped cream, red food colouring, some cereal bowls, the Schweppes bottle that did not contain Schweppes, a disturbing amount of sugar and, last but not least in potential for catastrophe, a stand mixer.
“I think I saw on a recipe video that we should prepare the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients separately,” said Tristan, who for once in his life was not wrong.
“You tackle the dry ones and I do the wet ones?” Gawain offered, jittering with excitement and Monster Energy Drink, which he had stolen from Dinadan’s secret private stash.
“Sure!” Tristan replied, matching his excitement.
Now, you may be wondering why there no dirty joke about wet ingredients was said and, to be honest, I am too. The only explanation I can give as to this very out of character situation is that the pair was far too focused on the fine science of baking to notice this golden opportunity. This uncharacteristic lack of horniness on their behalf was however short lived, as Gawain had decided to tackle his task of preparing the wet ingredients in a rather unconventional way. It was also at this point that Dinadan, while editing the video, had added the horniness equivalent of a pokémon’s HP bar on two of the screen’s corners, preparing the viewers for what was to come.
“Wait Tristan,” he said, “We should do this like proper yourselfcylinderers. Explaining our process to the viewers and all.”
“You’re right. Never it shall be said that we didn’t take this seriously,” the other man replied, his mouth full of pink whipped cream. Gawain nodded in approval and turned himself to face directly at the camera.
“To prep the wet ingredients, I am going to put in this cereal bowl some “Schweppes”, a couple of eggs, and the red food colouring,” he said, his voice as serious as it could be.
“I think sugar’s a wet ingredient too,” chimed in Tristan, who was pouring the flour on the plate in the meantime.
“That makes no sense, but for some reason, I’ve trusted you up to now, and I don’t see why I should stop,” he then turned to face the camera again, “I’m also adding the sugar and the sprinkles, because if sugar count as wet then sprinkles should too. I am now going to grab the stand mixer and whisk them together.”
And he proceeded to do exactly that, which resulted in a natural calamity, as the content of the small cereal bowl spattered around the room like water out of a faulty sprinkler. The three aspiring yourselfcylinderers were now covered in the red mixture, and looked like they had just gutted a piñata, if piñatas had blood. You would expect the trio to be displeased by this arrangement, but Iseult just looked at her colleagues behind the kitchen isle and said:
“You know what? That’s actually kind of hot.” Gawain turned around to look at his reflection on the fridge door.
“That’s true,” he said and he turned to check Tristan out too, who was uncharacteristically quiet as he looked back at him. The horniness bars that Dinadan edited in went up. Still, despite the interruption, Tristan and Gawain were determined to bake the cake, like “proper yourselfcylinderers”, and quickly composed themselves and got back to cooking.
“I’m now adding the wet ingredients that didn’t explode into the plate with the dry ingredients, adding some of this yeast and, finally, mixing all of this together with the stand mixer,” said to the camera Tristan, who had clearly learned nothing from his previous experiences. As he attacked the plate with the stand mixer, flour erupted in all of the room, coating it and it’s occupants like a blanket of snow. Tristan looked confused as he stared as his girlfriend and his— well, at Gawain.
His horniness bar went up and I, your humble narrator, sincerely hope that Dinadan gets a Nobel prize for editing this footage, and just in general for dealing with the other two members of world famous folk rock band “Play Not”.
Nevertheless, the show must go on, and Tristan took a large sip of “Schweppes” to cool off, and spat some of it out, having seemingly forgotten it was “Schweppes” and not Schweppes in his unsettled state.
Gawain moved the remaining mixture from the plate and put it in a large bowl, adding some sugar, flour and rainbow sprinkles to make up for the losses. They somehow managed to mix everything without further incidents and they even remembered that yeast needs to rest, but this left them with some downtime to feel, which didn’t foretell anything good.
“You know what’s fun and tasty?” said Gawain, who hated boredom with a burning passion, “This milk soup I had in a restaurant once. We should make our version of it, as a side dish for the cake”
“Great idea,” concurred Tristan, “Iseult, where do we keep the ramen?”
“In that crate by the sofa,” she answered. As Gawain fetched the ramen, Tristan grabbed an ornamental horn and poured some milk in it. Gawain then opened the instant ramen cup and handed his colleague the ramen powder package, which he promptly poured in the horn. None of them, as they put the horn in the microwave, seemed to notice what horrible crime against the laws of food, and just nature in general, they were committing, except for maybe Iseult, but if she did she kept quiet about it.
“What are we going to do with these leftover noodles?” asked Tristan.
“We make Gatorade soup,” said Gawain.
“Gatorade soup?”
“Yeah, Gatorade soup.”
“Sounds good, I’m in”, Tristan concluded.
Gawain opened the fridge, pulled out a Gatorade bottle and poured in the cup with the noodles, which he put in the microwave with the horn.
Now, if you, a regular human person that is not batshit crazy, are reading this, you are probably wondering “What the fuck? What the actual fuck? What the fuuuuuuck? What? What the fuck?” and “What on earth is wrong with them? What the fuck? What the fuckkkkkk?” And to that, my friend, I have no answer. What I can tell you instead is how their cake baking endeavours continued, since, from this point on, it can only get better.
They soon got bored of waiting for the yeast and decided to pour the mixture into the cake pan whether the yeast had done whatever it is that yeast does or not, and then put the whole thing in the fridge. Thankfully, Iseult had the brilliant idea to preheat the oven while the other two were busy making uncanny soups, because she cared about the content she was producing and thought that she should speed things up a bit.
As the cake was baking, the trio decided to kill some time by playing Mario Kart, which sparked numerous squabbles, heated debates and fistfight, mostly over the choice of map (“Rainbow Road is the best and I will fight anyone who says otherwise,” Tristan voiced his rather unpopular opinion, and immediately got attacked by the other two). When they got as far as to actually play the game, everyone cheated blatantly, which caused even more fighting. Luckily, just as Iseult was about to hit Gawain on the head with her Wii remote, the oven timer rang in a classic case of “saved by the bell” and they all ran excitedly towards the kitchen area of the loft.
They pulled the monstrosity out of the oven, reversed it on a plate and got ready to decorate. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with a description of said monstrosity, as it is something that I still cannot fully comprehend, but since this is a real video on the real YourselfCylinder in the real life you can see for yourself, so my describing it is quite useless. Actually, now that I think of it, I don’t know why I am writing about a real video on the real YourselfCylinder in the real life if you can just look it up and watch it, but now I’m too far into writing it to stop, so let us continue.
As I was saying, the master patissiers were getting ready to decorate, all of their plans of being “proper yourselfcylinderers” long forgotten. They prepared the piping bag and filled it with Gawain’s precious bubblegum flavoured whipped cream and set up all of the other ornaments for the cake, such as some cocktail umbrellas, radish (“because it matches the colour palette”), and some edible flowers that world famous folk rock band “Play Not” had in their fridge for no apparent reason.
“We’ve finished the sprinkles. Do you have some other ones? It is necessary that our cake has sprinkles,” said Gawain, distressed.
“Bottom left drawer,” chimed in usefully Iseult from behind her stolen camera.
“You know, Tristan,” said Gawain as he rummaged through the drawer in search of the indispensable sprinkles, “I haven’t heard you make one feet related comment this afternoon. Maybe you’re not as bad as I thought.”
“Thank you,” said Tristan, grinning widely as he piped a mediocre foot drawing onto the cake. As Gawain emerged from behind the counter he was, of course, let down.
“I fucking hate you so much,” he said, but he added the sprinkles nonetheless. The camera was shaking from Iseult’s unrestrained laughter.
It was at this pivotal moment of their baking adventure that the third and most mentally stable member of word famous folk rock band “Play Not”, Dinadan, walked into the loft.
“What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck, is going on here,” he said. It was now, and only now, that the three aspiring yourselfcylinderers actually looked around the kitchen and realized the absolute shitstorm they had caused.
“Oh, you know, just good old fashioned American fun,” said Gawain sheepishly.
“I’m not even sure we’re in America,” was Dinadan’s dry response.
“We were just making a YourselfCylinder video, Didy. D’you want to say hi to the viewers?”
“I would prefer not to be associated with this video in any way,” he answered, fully knowing that he was going to end up editing it, “now, why in hell is the Schweppes bottle empty?” Gawain just smiled in response.
“Can we interest you I some cake? Or would you perhaps prefer some soup?” said Iseult. Dinadan cast a quick look to the foot themed cake and decided immediately on the soup.
In the midst of the kitchen’s chaos, word famous folk rock band “Play Not” (plus Gawain, who would hate the idea of being in parentheses) set the table and prepared to eat: the soups were brought out of the microwave and the cake was carefully cut, as Dinadan took Iseult’s place as cameraman. They all sat around the round glass table and dug into their questionable and quite frankly terrifying food.
“This is fucking amazing,” said Dinadan, slurping up the Gatorade ramen with gusto, “What is it?”
“Gatorade soup,” Tristan answered.
“Oh, nice. A classic, truly.”
And on this baffling commend, the video ended and cut to an image of word famous folk rock band “Play Not” dressed as bodies of water with a badly drawn speech bubble that said “stream censored by word famous folk rock band play not” in comic sans.
And thus ends our tale of adventure and innovative cooking, I hope it was rousing, instructive and perhaps even amusing. I wish to all that read this a pleasant “afternoon”, or whatever very real and existing time of day it is where and when you peruse this manuscript.