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It had been a little weird to move into a space without any memory of living anywhere but in the cluttered stockroom of a magic shop. Marinette had had few belongings to contribute and little knowledge of what was needed to fill a household. Fortunately, André was always on hand to give advice, and her roommate, Kagami, didn’t seem to mind providing 99% of the furniture, kitchenware, and other odds and ends. Xavier had donated an impressive stack of cookbooks, home repair books, and cleaning manuals (something Marinette had never heard of). Kagami was more interested in these. Marinette found them intimidating.
She had set up her room to be a place she liked, or at least a place she didn’t feel weird inviting Zoé to hang out in. The bathroom was tidy, with each roommate’s things isolated on one side of the sink. The living and dining area wasn’t huge, but it was large enough for Kagami to sit at one end and read while Marinette practiced her new and only hobby, crochet. In short, the place was perfect, with only one tiny issue:
Marinette and Kagami didn’t know how to cook.
This had been okay at first. Kagami had money, and cafés and restaurants were abundant. But you can only live off of store-bought food for so long before you start craving self-sufficiency.
Unfortunately, self-sufficiency in this case meant burnt eggs, raw chicken, or mushrooms so tough they were practically rubber.
“I can’t do this anymore!” Kagami finally snapped, throwing an entire pan into the trash with a grilled-cheese nightmare still stuck to its surface. “I am tired of trying to figure this out. This is the fourth recipe I have tried, Marinette. I am cursed with cooking failure.”
Marinette understood. She really did. “I can try to, um,” she tried to remember what was in the fridge. “I can try to make chicken again. I’m sure it will go better next time, Kagami.”
“And I am sure it won’t.” Kagami sat heavily at the kitchen table and pulled at a strand of her hair. “It was so cruel of my mother not to teach me anything about cooking. I don’t mean to be insensitive, Marinette, but at least you have some excuse.”
“I get it,” Marinette said, “but I think you technically have an excuse, too. And I don’t think we need excuses—”
“No,” Kagami agreed to a claim Marinette wasn’t making, “we just need to do better.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Marinette said. She pulled the frying pan out of the trash and started scraping the blackened, bubbly goop off using a dirty spoon from the sink. What would André or Xavier say if they were here? “Not knowing how to cook doesn’t make either of us failures. We’re working against unfavorable circumstances.”
Kagami sighed, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. “On a logical level, I agree,” she said. “I am just overwhelmed by how many times I have failed at what sources say is an exceptionally simple cooking task.”
“Sources written by people who have been cooking for way longer than we have,” Marinette pointed out. The cheese gunk was stubbornly clinging to the pan, and she tried scraping from a different angle. “But if you’re tired of failing at the basics, we could always try something that’s supposed to be really hard to make.”
She’d meant it as a joke, but she could tell by the way Kagami’s expression cleared that she’d stumbled onto something potentially genius. “Why not?” Kagami asked. “At least everyone fails at… at…”
What was something everyone failed at? The thought struck her: “Macarons.” Marinette must have scrolled past them dozens of times in her search for simple recipes. Macaron recipes always said things like Macarons Made Simple or No-Stress Macarons. Obviously, they had to be some kind of baker’s nightmare.
“Macarons,” Kagami echoed thoughtfully. “I have heard those are difficult to bake. Baking in general is sometimes considered more difficult to learn than cooking.” She smacked one hand onto the table resolutely. “Yes. I will bake macarons with you, Marinette. You find the recipe, and I will purchase the ingredients.”
As it turned out, Kagami had needed to purchase not only the ingredients for macarons but also a stand mixer and a “macaron mat,” which went on the baking tray and had little circles to guide one’s piping bag. Piping bags! She’d bought those, too, along with a dozen piping tips she never planned to use. “The half-inch is 1A, right?” she asked Marinette, studying the tip rims.
“Right,” Marinette said. “Do these look like stiff peaks to you?”
Kagami studied the egg white concoction in the stand mixer’s bowl. “Maybe,” she said. She didn’t see how egg whites, or any non-solid, could be stiff, but these looked a lot like the recipe pictures she and Marinette had studied. “We should go for it.”
“Yeah,” Marinette agreed after a moment’s hesitation. “Now we sift in the flour and sugar, right?”
The mesh sieve was another thing Kagami had bought. Her mother probably would have warned her not to waste money on such special-use items, but Kagami was 90% sure the manor’s kitchen had had at least six types of strainers. “Right. No—wait. We add the egg whites to the flour and sugar mixture.”
“Right!” Marinette shuffled things around so Kagami could pour and sift the dry ingredients more easily. The way she seemed to intuit where things should be placed in the kitchen might have been intimidating if Kagami wasn’t so grateful to have her support. “You sift, I’ll mix.”
“Fold, you mean.”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
Kagami did some quick tidying while Marinette began folding the egg whites, sugar, and almond flour into a batter, but Marinette called her over after a few minutes.
“Here,” she said. “You try.”
Kagami’s first reaction was suspicion, but the earnestness in Marinette’s voice gave her cause to ignore the feeling. She took the rubber spatula and gave the batter an experimental stir.
“Not like that,” Marinette said. “Imagine you’re using the spatula to fold a piece of fabric.”
Kagami tried to visualize cloth draped over the flat of the spatula. “Like this?”
“Perfect,” Marinette said. Kagami was surprised to find herself trusting Marinette’s baking authority in spite of the fact that they were equally inexperienced. Something about the way she moved around the kitchen just felt natural, like she knew it instinctively. It was… nice. Kagami didn’t feel like she was the only person responsible for the meal. She wasn’t worried about whether she would fail and ruin the evening. No one made perfect macarons on the first try, anyway.
“Okay!” Marinette said. “Stop! That’s the ideal macaronage.”
“How can you tell?” Kagami asked, stopping at once.
Marinette opened her mouth and paused, blinking as if she’d lost her train of thought. “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “It just looked—I guess it looked like the pictures from the recipes.”
“I suppose it does.” Kagami hadn’t noticed. It would take a lot more practice before she could recognize perfect macaronage herself. “We should fill the piping bag.”
The piping step was much simpler, though Kagami’s macarons were a little lopsided. Marinette’s were wonderfully neat, and Kagami didn’t even feel jealous or worse by comparison. “Your macarons look beautiful, Marinette,” she admitted. Compliments didn’t come easily for her, but Marinette’s smile was worth the effort. Seeing her roommate’s face light up made Kagami feel like she could shake off her mother’s influence with hardly a movement.
“You should do the bang-on-the-counter part,” Marinette said. “Knock those air bubbles into next week!”
Kagami smiled and thwacked the tray of macarons on the kitchen counter once, twice, three times. “Now they just need to sit?”
“Right,” Marinette said. “Hey—let’s make some tea while we wait for the shells to harden. We’ve definitely earned a break.”
“We don’t need to earn breaks,” said Kagami. It was something she’d read in one of her many, many trauma-recovery books.
“That’s true,” Marinette said firmly. “But we totally did.”
“I see.” Kagami took the kettle to the sink and filled it.
“We don’t need to earn breaks, but, like, if we did need to, we would have. Just now. By making macarons.”
“They’re not done yet.”
“All the hard part’s done.”
“Famous words spoken before burning macarons to oblivion,” Kagami quipped. “Chef crushed under her failure, and also her apartment roof. Roommate caught in the collateral.”
Marinette snorted, nearly dropping the mugs she had grabbed for tea. “You would totally, like, do a crazy-cool flip out of the window or something.”
Kagami shook her head. “No, it’s like being a sea captain. I have to go down with the ship. The ship being the macarons.”
“Welcome aboard The Macaron. Looks like the waves are coming in stiff peaks today…” Marinette laughed at her own joke for a good long while. Kagami might have even laughed along, too.